Spring Break 2014, ITALY! Part 2

Skiing in the alps was amazing! The runs weren't quite as difficult or long as the runs in Colorado that I normally go to with my family, but the view was gorgeous and the snow was thick and soft. I sometimes felt like I was skiing through Italian gelato. The mountains seemed to go forever and had huge valleys between them. The weather was warm and it had been quite sunny there recently which caused several small avalanches before we arrived and even during our time skiing. Because of these avalanches, the resort decided to close the top part of the mountain which is why we couldn't ski the more difficult and longer runs at the resort. Cam and I skied from 9 am to 5pm everyday, taking a noon break to enjoy the warm sun and beautiful view on the top of the mountain.

All the snow we had outside our resort

 

Wish I could claim we built this igloo...

Some of the small avalanches can be seen in this picture 

The long skiing days tired us out though, so each night we relaxed a little and then walked to the local pizzeria in the small ski village. The entire menu was in Italian and the waitresses hardly knew any English. Each night we spent about a half hour reading over the 71 pizzas trying to decide what each topping was. In the end it was more fun just to pick a random pizza and be surprised. One night we ordered one with horse jerky on it and another with blue cheese on it...they tasted interesting but still delicious.

The local Pizzeria was packed!

 The second day of skiing I told cam I'd be a little more adventurous and go through some of the tree trails he had found the day before. He said his goal was to make me fall- I thought he was joking... The second run of the day, he takes a quick turn into the woods and sticking to my word I followed him....the snow was pretty thick and was covered by a layer of thin ice. I was doing alright until my ski caught under the ice during a turn and I face planted. I got up and continued skiing until I reached an area with several 8 or 10 foot drops in a between trees. I knew I would end up falling several more times so I took off my skies, slid down the drop offs on my bottom, and walked during the flat portions between each drop off..with each step the snow hit around the hips making walking through the snow quite difficult. About 20 minutes later I emerged from the forest and spent the next 10 minutes knocking clumped snow and ice off my ski boots so I could put my skies back on. I hurried down the rest of the mountain hoping to catch Cam before he went through the trail again in search for me, but I just missed him!! In the end we only lost about a half hour of skiing and I had some extra sore muscles from walking in the deep snow..the laughs were worth it though! The afternoon of the second day we were skiing in snow clouds. It was so neat.

At the top of each run it was so foggy I could hardly see my skies and poles, we didn't get to the end ski trip with last looks of the gorgeous view, but had some fresh powder for our last couple runs!