"Mongolia is kind of close, right?" Story about an attempt to ski everywhere in the world where there's snow. And in some places where there isn't. On and off-piste skiing on all continents, skiing into craters of live volcanoes, caving, climbing, photography, and travel.
Did a quick few sets of runs at the Serena Ski today. They're setting up the slopes, all snow guns running at full blast. And only the street slope is open. But I did ski couple of the closed ones, too... wonderful colors and snow flying all over the place.
There was even a lit Christmas tree on the slopes!
Ticket:
I've of course been here before, Serena is just half an hour drive from where I live. Here is one earlier article: quiet hour.
This article has also been published at TGR. Read the full Planetskier series at planetskier.net, or all blog articles from Blogspot, TGR. Photos, videos, and text (c) 2024 by Jari Arkko.
Titlis is a 3238 m high mountain above the Engelberg ski resort in Switzerland. Engelberg is a great place for skiing early or later in the winter, like now we were skiing here in April.
We did a lot of fun skiing, went to the sauna at the hotel, so much fun. My most memorable part of the trip was skinning up to the peak of Mt. Titlis. You can't get there on ski lifts, but if you take the rotating gondola, Engelberg's famous "Rotair" lift, you can ski down the col towards the top of the Ice Flyer lift, then you see the ridge from the above picture lifting towards the mountain top. Follow the ridge up, but not too close to the edge obviously in case there's a cornice. Usually there are tracks to follow.
The col is around 3015 meters or so, and you may be able to gain some speed on the downhill leg from Rotair to go a few meters above the col on the ridge. The peak is at 3238 meters, so you'll need to skin about a bit over 200 meters, which isn't too bad. But of course this is high alpine environment, so there's likely severe winds even on calm days. And on bad weather days... don't attempt this. There's many cliffs to fall off, as said cornices to worry about, and of course avalanches are also a danger. As you get closer to the peak, be in particular careful. On the side of the mountain shown in the above picture, I wouldn't call the slopes gentle but they are skiable. On the right hand side and at the other side (behind the mountain) Titlis drops off as massive cliffs. So stay clear. And if you climb the very peak, the last 10-20 meters, it is challenging as you'll have drop-offs on all sides, even on both sides of the path you'll use to hike up those last meters.
There was wonderful powder skiing on all days, even outside Titlis. Jarmo took some great photos, like these ones:
But I particularly liked this panorama:
A video:
Here's the top of Titlis. It was treacherous place to climb to, the rest of the hike was just heavy, but at the very top there was some climbing (with skis and boots), and a fall... you would not just fall back to your foot steps, but quite likely onto the steep snow towards the abyss... So falling wasn't really an option.
Hiking to the Titlis and skiing on its slopes:
Here's more powder skiing elsewhere on the mountain. But first we must duck some ropes:
This article has also been published at TGR. Read the full Planetskier series at planetskier.net, or all blog articles from Blogspot, TGR. Photos, videos, and text (c) 2022 by Jari Arkko, Jarmo Ruuth, and Tero Kivinen.
