Snow, Wind and Sunshine on a Swiss Glacier

Skiing fresh snow on the Steinberg Glacier.

It was springtime in the Alps a few days ago when we skied Adelboden. Winter arrived in Engelberg yesterday. It blew in with a vengeance – low-slung snow clouds hung just over the valley floor, flattening the light and erasing the line between sky and earth on the slopes high above the treeline. New snow fell hard and covered old snow. Skiers and riders cheered.

The snow fell for hours covering the hardpack, the bare spots and the chop from earlier storms, but visibility continued to be non-existent almost all day. Because so much skiing is above the treeline, without definition, it is difficult, often impossible, to tell where the sky ends and the snow surface starts. Skiing by Braille, I call it. "Like skiing inside a ping-pong ball" added one of my colleagues. In the late afternoon, as the lifts closed, the clouds parted and the setting sun kissed the high peaks. Today carried great promise.

This morning indeed dawned with clear skies and radiant sunshine -- and high-mountain winds in the wake of the retreating snowstorm and in advance of the warm North African winds that are forecast. We formed up at 8:30, stood in a long Sunday morning line and, with dozens of our closest ski companions rode a succession of three lifts (one six-passenger gondola and two cable cars) from the village of Engelberg (1,050 meters, 2,445 feet) to the top of Klein Titlis (3,028 meters, 9,934 feet).

With a vertical of nearly 7,000 feet -- unheard of in North America -- the weather up high and the weather in the valley are vastly different. A mellow breeze whispered around the village of Engelberg, but the wind was howling, pluming yesterday's storm into cold white smoke at the summit. It raked yesterday's new snow off some slopes and packed it onto others. Even some places on the marked, groomed pistes were covered with machine-packed powder, while other spots were blown clean. Fortunately, temperatures were not too low, because that would have made for wicked windchill.

The highest of Engelberg's two-stage gondola and two cable cars is the Rotair. Its round cabin makes a slow 360-degree turn between its bottom and top stations. I don't know the dynamics at other times, but this morning, I found it to be a weird ride. The kind of adapted American pop music that Europeans favor for après-ski doodled through the sound system. People yelled and shouted to their companions. It got me to thinking about tram rides I've taken at Snowbird and Jackson Hole, where the obligatory American safety cautions are followed by reverential silence. Riders who speak at all do so in hushed tones. Not so this time, where random noise distracted from thoughts of the long glacier run we were about to ski.

Engelberg offers a bastion of off-piste opportunities -- glaciers, chutes bowls and couloirs lure strong skiers and riders. In the US and Canada, people who venture into the ungroomed, avalanche-vulnerable backcountry usually carry wear tranceivers and carry shovels. Like most visitors, we went with guides who know the way. Peter and Regula Reinle -- both locals and former ski instructors, intimately acquainted with the mountain -- led us down the Steinberg glacier, avoiding crevasses and known slide areas and out a tricky ski-out. In all, we skied 4,000 vertical feet of wild terrain in one run.

We ducked under the rope (permitted in Switzerland) and onto the glacier. The upper section is an enormous white bowl scooped out of the upper reaches of Klein Titlis. Today, it was overlaid with nearly a foot of new snow -- some windpacked, some loose. A few turns and we were in a rock-rimmed white world from which all signs of the hand of man had disappeared -- the cable car with its annoying music and loud riders, the huge summit structure where the cable car docks, its four restaurants, gift shop and more retail opportunities, and the microwave tower. On the glacier, the silence set in, broken only by the muffled gah-phumph of each turn.

Time is suspended on a run like this. Some skiers make swooping arc turns down the fall line -- steep at the head of the glacier, gentling lower down -- but I am a more deliberate skier. I prefer to traverse a bit between turns, because I like the feeling of first tracks through a patch of unchopped snow. I also like to take it easy to take in the jaw-dropping scenery and to savor the experience that we simply don't have in the US.

After a while, the glacier necked down between rock walls, falling into a short, steep drop at the foot of the icefield. Above us were vertical cliffs of bare rock. Our route opened again into another smaller snowfield, necked down once more into a natural halfpipe and skirted around some more rocks and the first few tenacious bushes and then small trees. A series of small drops, flats and rolls fed down into the flat, mid-mountain valley and the frozen-over surface the lake called Trübsee, the Iglu Village that I posted about yesterday and a horizontal quad that traverses the lake, ferrying skiers and riders from one the lift sector to another.

The sense of wildness was gone in an instant -- like flicking a switch from the deep backcountry to an extensively developed mountain. Was it the best powder run of my life? Not really. I liken Rocky Mountain powder to the lightest down comforter, while Alpine powder is denser and heavier, more like one filled with regular feathers. Was it the best scenically and experientially? For sure, it was one one of the top three ever.

We hopped into the transfer lift and wormed through another killer line to the middle cable car, and by then it was almost lunchtime. It was just before noon, and the wind had picked up to 60 kilometers per hour. The mountain company closed the upper chairlifts (the round Rotair can actually operate in higher winds than some of the other lifts). Lunch, a little more skiing in the mid-mountain gale and then down to the village on the long ski-out. It makes a long, looping detour -- windfree this afternoon -- around dramatic banded cliffs, through the forest, past a sheltered beginner area without sun or great views but no wind either. It ends up at the bottom station of the lowest cable car.

The new snow made me wonder what was happening at home. According to today's Colorado ski reports, Wolf Creek got 31 inches of new snow in the last 48 hours, Monarch 20 inches, Purgatory/Durango Mountain Resort 13 inches, Telluride 12 inches, the Aspen areas 9 to 11 inches and the areas closer to the Continental Divide along the I-70 corridor receuved new snow in the single digits. It would be lighter and more powdery than what fell onto, and blew around, Engelberg's mountains. But then, at home, there are no wild white glaciers to ski.