Why’d you hike up that?

Today we went to Cervinia, which is like Zermatt, but Italian. They have the Matterhorn, all right, but not the view you’d recognize. Pretty nice town, Cervinia, but it’s not quite Zermatt, somehow. Smaller, sure, quieter for certain. Fewer deadly electric cars that sneak up on you like squat pumas, pouncing at the last moment, scattering groups of Japanese tourists like frightened gulls. Seems like most of the Italian ski towns are like that…same mountain as their cross-the-border counterparts without the international fame and recognition. Or the crowds on powder days. Or any days. That must be because they suck. Badly. Don’t come to Italy to ski, even if you lose a bet.

Ironically, even though Cervinia, like all the Italian mountains is totally heinous and virtually unskiable, we managed to find a couple of lines that looked like fun. Surprisingly, there was no lift to the top of them nor even, shockingly, a snack bar once we got to the top. Just a large cylindrical building with what looked like a satellite antenna and four canisters marked “Oxygen” in bold white letters. The cylinder stood sentinel over a large, lonely bowl full of creamy spring corn, finally softened at 12:00 by the oblique rays of the sun. Russ and I stood near the cylinder catching our breath. The south-facing approach had more than softened up by the time we got to it and what looked like easy walking turned out to be 45 minutes or so of thigh-deep postholing followed by desperate scrambling on loose shale. The best part was, we were in full view of the lift attendant who no doubt was thinking “What the hell are they doing?”

Well, we knew what we were doing. Or at least had the confidence that we knew what were doing.

At the top we surveyed the run and watched the chairlift spin in the distance, relishing the fact people were no doubt sitting on the lift, sweat-free and breathing normally, thinking “Why’d you hike up that?”

They’ll probably never know why we hiked up a mostly-melted out ridgeline but 400 vertical meters of creamy turns, a rock drop or two and a tight chute finishing in a series of rollers more than answered the question for us.