Sorry Dana

It seems that my eulogy for ski season was a bit early.

We got five days of gorgeous weather, and although Courmayeur is now closed, Cervinia and La Thuile were still open, as is the Toula. Dana and I skinned around up high one morning and then skied the Toula in the afternoon, in snow conditions that we have called "breakable mush" or "bottomless corn". I don't know why it doesn't consolidate, but it is hard to ski because it sucks you under. I now present some brief videos of Dana on that run. Sorry, Dana.





And my Favorite: Watch the end...



Dana showed he could still rip it up, though. Here he is going down one of the steepest lines of the year at La Thuile on Wednesday.

The End of the Ski Season

The end of the ski season is upon us. Dana, Miky, Weeze, and I went to Sicilia for Easter. I was away from the mountains for ten warm spring days and now the snow is a brown color, screaming to the few faithful skiers, “get your turns in now, because I am just going to get darker and darker, until one day you will be skiing in last year’s cow plop.” The whole town is different, too. Normally a sleepy town, Courmayeur has shut down after Easter. Hotels are closed, free bus services are halted, and – the biggest kick in the testicular region – the Val Veny tram is closed. For the loyal readers who remember my first few blog posts, I used to have to take a bus to the main tram. This is what I have to do now, except that the free bus service is no longer operational. Great idea.

Also while I was away, the bus services that didn’t shut down changed their schedules. So even the buses that charge you don’t show up at their normal times. Trying to get to the tram this morning, I got the distinct impression that Courmayeur wanted me to end my season. Well guess what, Courmayeuresi: you want my blood? Take it! Take my blood! I am going to keep pushing along until I am skiing on cow plop, just like Samuel L. Jackson in The Negotiator. I still enjoyed myself today, despite breakable mush, and if it gets sunny the skiing will still be great.

I am feeling worse about the end of this ski season than I have ever felt before. The town has changed, most of the other ski bums have gone back to their summer jobs, and the rest of them have gone on to summer activities, like rock climbing and smelling bad. I think the main reason that I am so depressed about the imminent lift closure is that I have never been a full-fledged ski bum before. I ski a lot, and I bummed in Utah for a month, but never for a whole season. Now I am left with a sense of emptiness. It’s like graduating: you have successfully completed an important step in your life and it’s gratifying, but now you have no idea what to do with yourself. I hope I can get a few more good days in before having to decide…

A video/photo journey to Refugio Elisabetta

Last week Dana, Weeze, and I went to Refugio Elisabetta. We decided that we were getting too fat from our slothlike skiing habits and monstrous eating habits. With so much lift-accessed powder to ski, and so much food to get for free from Gianni - the gay barista who has taken a liking to me – we aren’t really culpable. Blame the system, man. Regardless of the cause, though, we used our combined powers of deductive reasoning to infer that, seeing how much snow you can find from the lift and how lazy Italian skiers are, if we actually had to earn our turns, we would have first tracks for days. By golly, our prohibitively expensive college educations finally paid off. Thanks, Mom and Dad!

From the Youla cable car, we skied down into an untouched bowl.Our tracks are in the sun, but you can’t see them. Sorry. Then, we put on our skins and skinned up and over the next ridge, bootpacking at the top as the clouds continued to lift.

This put us into the top of an even bigger bowl, and we skied shallow, smooth powder

all the way down to the Lago di Combal, where the sun was shining on Refugio Elisabetta. You can see it right at the base of the pyramid in the middle of the picture.

As we finished the hour-long skin, clouds started to move in and we ended up with an inch of new snow, on top of the other few feet of untouched. We saw some old heliskiing tracks coming down to the hut, and we were worried about not getting any good turns. But the hut was comforting. Although it is officially closed in the winter, there is a room with mattresses, blankets, electricity, and a table. We could see why Italians don’t like backcountry skiing…

The next morning, we woke to bluebird skies, and picked out the most obvious line, as seen from the hut.

This picture was actually taken at 7 PM, after we skied the face for two days. You can see our tracks if you look closely, but the face is north facing so it is shady most of the day. This is what it looked like when we first skied it (credits: Weeze getting first rips with Dana providing the soundtrack):

Gosh that was good skiing. It was a hard and long skin to get there, so we headed down after one rip. But then we realized that it stays sunny until 8 PM now, and we skinned up the other way to the Pyramide Calcaire. We got to the col at around 7 PM, so the depth perception was way off and the photos are crap. But suffice it to say that we didn’t need depth perception for snow so powdery and untouched (possibly not skied this year).

And yes, it does drop off steeply below Dana.

The next day when we woke up after 12 hours of sleep, the clouds were socking us in. We decided to skin up to the same stuff, and when we arrived at the top, this is what we found:
Someone had skied everything out! Just kidding, those are our tracks (mine are the high ones, but that is Dana in the picture) after two days of skiing. Another prefectly sunny day! We took a few more laps on the upper part, and skied back to the hut after a second perfect day of skiing. The final damage looked something like this:

As you can see, we were making small, low speed turns, just like the italians., and there was nothing left to ski after the second day. The next day, we headed back into the front country. A whoppng hour and fifteen minutes from the hut, we were on top of the regular ski mountain again, attracting funny looks with our big packs.

The moral of this story is simple. The Italian Backcountry sucks. It takes too long to get there, there is nothing good to ski, and the huts are dumpy. The italians are absolutely right when they say that everything good to ski is groomed nightly. As for me, I might not be checking my email for a while. Please address correspondences to Refugio Elisabetta.

Prosciutto and Me

Italy is the home of probably hundreds of delicious “salumi”. The word salumi is not to be confused with salami, which in itself is not the same as the American product that shares the same word. Salami Piccanti, in Italia, are what we Ameicans call pepperoni. Pepperoni, in Italy, is the word for peppers, which has absolutely nothing to do with our bastardization of the word, I imagine. Pepperoni here are pretty much just like peppers in America. You’ve got your red, green, and yellow, and they are all wonderfully succulent, unless you buy them from the Eurospin. Not very exciting.

But American Pepperoni, or Salami Piccanti, are really good here. Imagine a Slim Jim, or a typical-supermarket American Pepperoni. Then imagine feeding those products to your dog, because that is what Italians would do if you showed up in Italy claiming that American Pepperoni are edible. Salami Piccanti are just one type of salami here, and all of them are better than anything we have in the Land of the Free. Which brings us back to salami in general. Salami here are 100 percent pork products, deliciosouly ground and blended with their own fats. There’s nothing I like better than fatty meat, and there are more kinds to try than I have been able to get my hands on. Each region has their own salami, with the meat ground to different fineness and different spices added. You can find them hung from the celing at any fine grocer. Salami here rock my world in a way that “salami” in America never could, and I think Francis Scott Key would agree with me.

Which brings us finally back to salumi. What you know as salami, in the Home of the Brave, does exist here. It is called “Hungarian Salami”, because, if you think about it, it really is just a giant version of the traditional salami, and every knows that Hungarian meat is bigger, right? But Hungarian Salami here is actually a salume. Where does one draw the distinction? Well, you need a meat slicer to serve this stuff, and it is sliced thin and presumably eaten on sandwiches, instead of served by itself, by homeless people. How could I be so insensitive? Because Hungarian Salami is arguably the least prestgious of all the saulmi in Italy, with the only other contender being mortadella. Other more fanciful salumi include the esteemed proscuitto crudo, coppa, speck, pancetta, bresaola, mocetta, lardo, culatello, and cotto.

Italy, for all its culinary ingenuity and prowess, reaches its peak at raw meat. I have been here for a few months, and I still cannot stuff enough salumi into my fat face. I might be in love with prosciutto crudo. I don’t care if it’s di Parma, San Danielle, or Toscano. It doesn’t matter if I eat it plain, with grissini, with cheese, or draped over melon. Just as long as it is raw, fatty, and salty, I will eat it. Today after skiing (there’s the skiing reference) I might have eaten over a pound of Crudo, but maybe I didn’t and I just wish that I had. The other salumi are great, but give me the crudo!

A lot of food snobs reading this might say, “but Hannafords sells prosciutto crudo for $14.99 per pound!” I retort by first pointing out that the fat bald guy who is cutting your crudo has absolutely no idea how to do it. You’ll end up with pieces of cured skin, or he’ll cut away all of the fat on the outside. The slices will be too thick to chew, and he will just plop them all down on top of each other like they were some cheap cold cut, virtually eliminating any chance of your true enjoyment of the product. Look at this picture:

Note how the slices don’t overlap. They are thin and have fat around the edges, with no skin. And then I would tell you that each slice costs less than half the price it would go for at Hannaford. That is exciting.

I hope we have all learned something today. From pepperoni to salami to salumi, if it is raw the Italians know how to do it better. I need to go eat some more right now.