Zugspitze

After my exhausting adventures on Hausberg yesterday, the little sniffle I had been ignoring for a few days bloomed into a full phlegm-fest overnight. Besides the stuffiness, I developed a throat so sore I was afraid I was in the early stages of strep, which would indeed be a very complicated glitch in my vacation plans - especially since I had gone through the process of getting an NHS card that covers medical care in continental Europe, and then left it neatly stacked in a pile of paperwork back in my studio in London. After suffering through that all night, I got up and got breakfast, but then decided to go back to sleep for another hour and do a shorter day on the slopes. I had promised myself that on the next clear day, I would go up to the highest peak in the Bavarian Alps: the Zugspitze. Not knowing if I would get another sunny day, I dragged myself out of bed, geared up, and headed out. The stuffy cold was nothing that a double dose of Sudafed couldn't hide for a few hours.

I wasn't entirely sure how to get the several miles down the valley to the base of the mountain, so I asked around for the right bus station. I got a couple of confused answers, waited around at one bus stop for a while, then realized that I had seen the train station that leads up the mountain just on the other side of the main tracks, and the confused directions to the bus station were probably due to the fact that there isn't really a bus that goes there. I hurried over, and within a few minutes I was on the streetcar that leads to another set of tracks where the historic cogwheel train leads steeply up the side of the mountain, and eventually straight up through the belly of the Zugspitze. I can't imagine who thought it would be a fine idea, many decades back, to blast a near-vertical tunnel through solid rock of the highest mountain in Germany, but there it is. An hour later, I was up at the last stop.

The Zugspitze is unlike any other place I've ever been skiing. The train station opens out onto the face of a wind-swept landscape, far above the tree line. The ski area sits on the "gletscher" - which, as its cognate suggests, is a permanent glacier that tops the peak. On this day, the light breeze in the valley belied a whipping wind high on the mountain, which barreled down the precipitous slopes pushing a sandblast of tiny ice crystals before it. Spindrift blown off the high altitudes funneled down in small twisters of dry snow. If I had been mountaineering, this would have been a sign to pack up and go home post haste, but downhill skiing is of course a much tamer sport, with the cogwheel train waiting whenever skiers tire of the weather.

I buckled my boots, stepped into my skis, and headed off down the hill. The snow was surprisingly powdery, which - I quickly discovered - stayed that way because of the constant stream of snow being blown off the upper reaches and onto the slopes. I took the main chair - another high-speed, six-person lift - a couple of times to warm up, and then I faced a question. I hadn't realized that all the other lifts on the mountain were t-bars, so if I wanted to go anywhere interesting, I was going to have to get over yesterday's glitch and hop back on the horse, so to speak. Which was doubly interesting since most of those t-bars were the only way out of the runs that led to them. On the plus side, being so far up the glacier, there were no trees at all, so if I fell I could just ski off instead of getting mired in forested territory between the lift and runs.

After a couple of runs up the t-bars I was much more comfortable with it, and with that I was able to cover most of the mountain except for the farthest reaches at the right side of the large bowl that made up the patrolled area. I was skiing very conservatively, being on unfamiliar gear and realizing that if I were to twist a knee on the ice it would be very hard for me to get down the mountain alone, much less all the way back to London without help. And, without chair lifts, the thighs never get a rest and I could feel the old twinge of a couple bad snowboarding moments creeping back into my knees. So I kept to the comfortably intermediate runs, though "intermediate" here is a little more adventurous than "intermediate" out in California.

And in any case, I was up there as much for the views as for the skiing. From the entrance to the train station, you can see nothing but mountains in every direction. A gondola takes visitors up to the actual peak, but there is no skiing up there - just a view so sweeping that it includes several nations and a handful of mountain ranges. And from that peak, you can take a separate gondola back down toward town over the opposite face. This is a journey I remember from childhood, that winter in 1985 when we last skied here - just a quick glancing look at the glacier-scape that runs up the mountain. This is not a gondola over a nice open slope; this is a ride over wind-blown ice formations and crevasses that don't seem any safer because of the open air altitude that separates the gondola from the rough, remote slope below.

After a couple hours I stopped for a late lunch and to give my tired legs a rest. Even inside the lodge, tiny shards of icy snows blew in every time someone opened a door. By the time I went out again, the weather was getting even wilder - warm enough while I was moving, but blasting cold on the long t-bar rides back up. Clouds were forming over the highest peaks, fed by the winds that picked up drifts of snow that joined with the clouds rather than falling again. Mountains like these make their own weather.

When the shadows got too long I headed back to the train station and caught the last ride down the mountain, back toward town. By the time I got back to the hotel, I was pretty chilled, and yesterday's adventures in the powder had left one side of my neck with seized up muscles. This region is known for its spas and imaginative complexes of swimming pools, and I had happened across one of them when I was walking around town on a previous night. I thought that a long soak in warm water would help unclench the soreness in my neck, so I grabbed a quick snack in the center of town and walked back to the Alpspitz Wellenbad. I thought I might have been there before, back when I was here with family over twenty years ago, but I wasn't at all prepared for the experience of walking into a place and knowing every corner of it without having known that I would recognize it. The complex has three large pools side by side: a warm pool, a diving pool, and at the far end, a pool that has lap lanes most of the time, except for the ten minutes or so every hour that they clear the lanes and switch on the large rotating blades hidden under one edge which turn the whole thing into a wave pool, with swells generated on one end and breaking gently over the other end. We had certainly been there before, and it seemed very strange to be here without family. The warm water helped enough with the cramps in my neck, and I skipped the wave pool since I was still feeling the chill of this cold I've been fighting and didn't want to go into the cold water. Afterwards I grabbed a pizza to go and headed back across town to the hotel, fell asleep almost before my head hit the pillow.