From the Mountains to the Sky Act 9: Skiing Mt Hutt

This past Saturday, we headed out to Mt Hutt for some downhill skiing. It was, in short, the best downhill skiing I've ever partaken in despite only a few of the many runs being open.

The day began driving through green fields, with trees and hedges all around, we drove towards the mountain peaks in the distance. As they approached, they slowly grew until they filled the entire horizon. We turned off the highway and up the Mt Hutt access road. This is a very steep road that winds upwards about 1300m over 15km. The speed limit is 40km/h, simply because you can't really go much faster.

Arriving at the chalet, we rented skis and snowboards and headed out onto the slopes for the day. We started at 9:30 and went straight through until the hill closed at 4:00pm. There is no night skiing as there are no lights on the hills. Taking the lift up the hill was a remarkable time. At the top, you could look out, over the snowy ski hill, down the rolling brown hills beneath to green fields at the bottom. Very different from skiing in Canada. Another incredible part was that the ski runs actually started at the very peak of the mountain.

These were by far the longest ski runs that I have ever been on. Even on my first run down the hill, my legs were quite sore by the time I reached the bottom. This was great and I'm definitely looking forward to going back when more runs are open, including the lower slopes of the hills. Some of the termini of the runs are so far from the top that there are buses rather than lifts to take you back up to the chalet.

Later in the day, clouds rolled in and we were quite literally skiing in the clouds. This would have been quite frightening if we didn't know the hill fairly well by this point. Visibility was greatly reduced and there were many people falling all over the hill. I took one quite big tumble myself, losing one ski. It was a good day.