The last days of the skiing season have a curious feeling. As the last visitors sweat down the slopes in
sunshine or top up tans in piste-side bars, there’s a slightly wistful tinge
as the snow turns to slush and melts back into the slopes.
But it’s a world away from the intense melancholy that
accompanies the shortening days and falling temperatures of autumn in a
coastal resort. The mountainsides are
being reborn, not closing down. The
shops want to swap ski gear for hiking boots, and the hotels want to advertise
swimming pools not saunas. As the mountains shrug off the grubby crust
of accumulated snow, an illusion lifts. As cigarette butts, dog turds and club flyers
are revealed by the snow’s retreat, so is the deep structure of the ski runs. This piste is a road, this one a footpath,
this one a gentle flower meadow.
This awkward metamorphosis lays bare a complex
and intricately evolved infrastructure – the cables that spider up and down hills, and the lifts, conveyor
belts, gates and pulleys that transport skiers up hills, like products in a
perpetual motion assembly line designed by Heath Robinson. Ski resorts are nature, but nature improved,
primped, preened. Through the winter, snow machines spew water
vapour into the freezing night air, and from the hotels and bars you can see the lights of piste-bashing tractors crawling up and down
steep inclines, turning their churned-up surface to uniform white corduroy.
There’s nothing natural about skiing either. Encased in polyester and crash helmets, and
balancing on a steep hillside, on two wobbly planks of carbon fibre, you are
told to lean downhill, against all common sense and years of conditioning. To turn right, you must lean or shift your
weight to the left; to turn left, you must do the opposite. And all the time, to retain any sense of
control, you must point your nose downhill.
But, for those fleeting moments when it works, when you feel
the sheer joy of swooping down the manicured winter wilderness, more or less in
control, you feel as close to flight as you can without leaving the
ground. Suddenly it feels like the most
natural thing in the world.
