Mountains6 min
The Fourth Morning on the Schilthorn
Murren has no road into it, which turns out to be the least interesting thing about the place.
You cannot drive to Murren. You leave the car at Stechelberg, take a cable car up through a layer of cloud that is doing its best to look permanent, and step out into a village that has been quietly declining to be convenient since about 1912. There are no cars in it. There is a funicular, a handful of hotels, and a view of the Eiger, the Monch and the Jungfrau lined up across the valley like something staged.
I had come with a group of eight women, none of whom knew each other, all of whom had been skiing for years and all of whom had said some version of the same sentence on the first evening: I am fine on piste, I have just never really gone off it.
Three days of nothing much
Our guide was a woman called Steffi who has worked this valley for thirty-one winters and has the particular calm of somebody who has watched a great many people be frightened and knows it passes. For three days she barely corrected anybody. We skied groomed runs. We did a long traverse. She asked us to stop halfway down a slope and look back up at our own tracks, which felt like an indulgence at the time and turned out to be the point.
What she was doing, I understood later, was letting us run out of things to be nervous about. By the third afternoon the group had stopped performing competence at each other. Somebody admitted she had not skied in four years. Somebody else said she had only come because her sister dropped out. The atmosphere changed considerably after that.
The fourth morning
On the fourth morning we took the cable car to the Schilthorn early, before the first lifts anywhere else in the Alps had properly started moving. It had snowed overnight, not dramatically, maybe fifteen centimetres. Steffi took us off the side of the marked run into a wide bowl that had nothing written on it at all.
I want to be accurate about this rather than romantic. The first eight turns were bad. I was leaning back, which everybody does, and the snow was heavier than I expected. Then something reorganised itself, the way it does, and the next forty turns were the best skiing of my life by a distance that is almost embarrassing.
I stopped near the bottom because I could not see properly. Marguerite, who is fifty-eight and had spent thirty years telling herself that groomed runs were her ceiling, arrived about a minute later and stopped for the same reason. Neither of us said anything for a while. Steffi waited at the bottom, entirely unbothered, having presumably seen this happen a hundred times.
What the week was actually for
The technical content of that week could have been delivered in two days. The rest of it was the part that mattered: enough time for eight women to stop pretending, and a guide patient enough to wait for that rather than fill the silence with instruction.
Three of the eight have booked the same week for next winter. Two have booked something harder. One has not been back on skis and has instead gone to Uzbekistan, which is also, I would argue, a version of the same outcome.
There is a lot of writing about mountains that treats the summit as the story. The mountain is not the difficult part and it never was. The difficult part is the conversation you have with yourself on the chairlift, and nobody sells a week that addresses it directly. This one did, mostly by not mentioning it.
Written by the Red Camellia team. Every trip we write about is one we have taken ourselves.
