Hinterstoder: Skiwoche

One of the perks of being an international student is that trips and outings come included with my school. The trip I was most looking forward to when I signed up for this whole adventure was a week of skiing. I brought an extra suitcase just for my ski gear.

One of my favorite things about myself is that I have two very distinct parts of my personality. The one most people tend to know me for is the really nerdy, studious, bookish, artsy girl who likes to dress in interesting clothes and collect pretty books about ancient Greece. The other girl, less known, is the one who likes to dive for frogs in muddy ponds, catch five feet of air on the piste, jump off cliffs into lakes, and climb mountains. What I love most about these two pieces of myself, is that although they seem contradictory, they work quite well together and are equally important to who I am. Those who truly know me, know this. However, now that I'm in an academic environment, most of my friends and acquaintances cannot imagine me letting a giant millipede crawl up my arm or being waist-deep in mud.

So it always catches people off guard when I go crazy about skiing. Skiing is one of my favorite things in the entire world. It is one of the few things I know that I am good at and one thing that makes me feel truly alive. It is not only the act of skiing itself that has become important to me but the memories I have associated with it; Early mornings looking out at the Teton Mountain Range, seeing moose in the Snake River, listening to Phantom of the Opera music because it was the only disc in the truck, playing Minecraft with my cousins in the evenings, drinking rootbeer in the hot tub at night and running through the snow barefoot, going on the tram for the first time and eating waffles in Corbet's Cabin, the list could go on and on.

I remember the first time I went skiing. I was five or six, and I had to wear one of the little worms on my skis that kept them from spreading too far apart. I cried the entire day, and I hated it. So when my mom forced me to join my siblings for a week of ski school a couple years later, I remember dreading it. I don't remember the moment I fell in love, but I know I fell in love with my whole heart, and I'm so thankful to my mom for forcing me to go, and to my aunt and uncle for providing me with the opportunity. Now, I can ski on any hill in the world and have a good time. What a blessing.

I cannot express how excited I was to ski in the Austrian Alps. It's every skier's dream, and I got to go for a week! I was such a chatterbox the entire car ride to the slope. I think my excitement was pretty clear because I had to stop and apologize a couple times for talking so much.

When we arrived the first thing we did was get rentals, drive up to the lodge, eat lunch, and then we finally went skiing. The trip consisted of four instructors, the entire freshman class of the Bogenhofen High School, and the Language Students, 24 people in all. For the first run, we were all together, the main goal being to determine who would be in what group based on their ability and performance. Well, we all quickly discovered that nineteen of the twenty students had little to no experience skiing. The one that did? It was me. This made me pretty anxious to find out how the rest of the week would go. There was no way that I would be allowed to ski on my own, but I was much more advanced than the other students and didn't want to be stuck learning pizzas down the green slopes the entire week either. By the end of our first day, they still hadn't really decided how we would be split up.

Karis asked me to accompany her to the outfitting store to help her pick out
a pair of good goggles and gloves, and I found this buff marked down from $30 to only $12.
It's so cute and it matches my ski gear perfectly! She was lucky to have had me, because
I found her a pair of Bollé goggles marked down from $130 to $40. 😎

First look at the mountains surrounding the slope.

That night we went snowshoeing. This was a new experience for me and I absolutely loved it. I was so excited to go on an adventure and have a new experience. A lot of my fellow language students didn't want to come which was perhaps the most confusing thing I've ever experienced (more confusing than German) to me. We're in the Alps, and you have the opportunity to go snowshoeing at night, yet you would rather watch a movie???? I think the experience would have been even more wonderful if there had been fewer people so that we could hear the sound of the forest at night, but it was still really fun.

Crawling under a barbed-wire fence.

Keegan was one of the few people actually excited about our little adventure.

We stopped in front of a gnarly, ancient tree and had worship.

On the first full day of skiing, our instructors decided that we all needed to go back to the basics, so they took us to one of the easiest hills on the mountain and began teaching us how to side slip. At this point, I was trying so hard to tell myself that any chance to be on the slope was a blessing and I would find ways to enjoy myself anyway. Maybe my determination didn't show on my face, because one of our instructors, Carmen, looked at me halfway through the exercise and said, "Afton, you can go take a few laps down this slope where I can see you. You don't need to do this exercise."

"Really???" Was my hopeful reply.

She nodded yes and I zoomed away, shouting thank you over my shoulder. After two laps down the small slope, the others had finally made it to the bottom and I meant up with them there. Carmen came over to me and told me that I could go up on the lifts and meet them in the same spot at 11:15. So, with a happy heart, I skipped away to the chairlift and spent the entire morning skiing on my own. I was so grateful to Carmen for the trust she put in me. Getting to ski on my own was the highlight of the trip. When I am alone, I feel more free, and I ski with more confidence. I was absolutely flying, whooping and hollering, and soaring down the mountain with all the force of someone who hadn't gotten the chance to hit the slopes for over two years. It was glorious.

That afternoon we got split into groups. I was with four other language school students, all boys, and we were a good group. They all improved a lot over the four days as well which made it even easier to ski as a group.

Ski Afton = The cooler version of Afton

Beautiful Alps

There were, of course, some challenges to the week. The main one was my confidence. On the one hand, I was far more advanced than the other students, but on the other hand, my instructors were incredible skiers. Compared to them, I was ridiculously bad at skiing. So, there was a lot of comparison happening during the week. I had a lot of frustration with myself because I couldn't ski as well as my instructors. Not necessarily because I was embarrassed, although there was some of that, but because I couldn't do the things they could. They talked about experiences I've always wanted to have but couldn't because I'm not advanced enough; like skiing powder in the backcountry. This created a sense of both great admiration towards them and disappointment in my own shortcomings. I had to remind myself that, although I've had lessons and opportunities to improve my skiing, I've never been able to ski consistently. Four days a year is enough to get you on blacks and double blacks, but it's not enough consistency to give you the confidence and ease you need to go off-piste, do tricks, or take any trail with full confidence. And that's okay. It is enough that I can ski, and I have something to aspire to for the future.

Other than skiing, we also got to do first aid and avalanche training on the slopes, which was a very neat experience, and very interesting as winter sports and winter survival are topics of extreme interest to me. On Wednesday, we got to use the Sauna. This was my first full sauna experience, in which I sweated for 15 minutes, rolled in the snow, took a cold shower, and then repeated it. I'm going to be honest, pouring the steam on the rocks was far worse than going out in the snow. It took a lot more bravery for me to remain in the sauna while my lungs filled with hot air than it did for me to run outside. And on Thursday, our instructors showed us some videos of Austrian skiers and taught us a bit more about ski culture here.

My friend Kendra was one of our instructors, and she is from Montana. She is a really good skier and we bonded a lot over our shared interests this trip. Something we noticed was how different the ski culture is here. In America, it's about the adventure, about seeking the thrill. We prioritize powder runs, backcountry skiing, forest trails, and moguls, but here it's all about the groomers. It's about skiing like a racer, learning to control speed and take short turns down the piste. This challenged me and Kendra to ski better. We are both off-trail girls, we like to cut into the woods and take the mogul runs, but there was hardly any of that here. It was only groomers.

For me, this was especially hard. Rendevous Mountain is notoriously steep, which means pretty much any black run on the mountain has naturally formed moguls. So, my instructors prioritized this in their teaching. I've learned to choose paths, take sharp hop turns around the moguls, and think strategically, but this week I was pressured to work on rhythm, using my ski polls for rhythm, not as pivot points and stabilizers, and to carve on each turn to control speed. It was definitely a challenge, but a welcome one.