This morning things were pretty much as usual for the week. It was cloudy in the valley, with the promise of blue skies on the mountain. The promise wasn’t fulfilled completely however. The sun shone early on, but clouds began to dominate by midday. It was very cold though, all the more so in the fog back to the village late in the afternoon.
Over the last twenty years or so, most of the lifts in our neck of the woods have been renewed. An exception has been Fallboden, which starts next to the Wixi base station. There was a plan to upgrade it at the same time as the Wixi chair, the new version of which is well over a decade old now, but it never happened. Fallboden is old and slow and goes nowhere in particular, dumping skiers in a slight hollow with only one route out.
Maybe the plan for a new, longer lift will be resurrected, but at the moment it seems unlikely. Over the last few years, the lift has been open rarely, normally at weekends and during the February half term holidays. This season it has not been open at all. Worse still, it has disappeared from the online piste maps and the digital boards around the mountains. One of our lifts has gone missing and it seems doubtful it will ever be found. There is no reason to regret its passing, but still I am sorry to see it go.
A day of some sun but increasing cloud brought 10,471 vertical metres in 21 lift rides and 56 kilometres travelled.
Idle thoughts from a mountain 