In the Alps, part I

Personally, I'm not one for gear.  Even more so since we've had a family, and the gear has multiplied.  Gear, stuff, to be dug out before going, to keep track of while we're out, to store when we come back home.  In wintertime so much stuff is already needed - warm clothing - just to survive in the cold, that we often found that we couldn't deal with anything more and have fun out there.  This is how we came to snowshoes.

We started using snowshoes a few years ago, and we love them.  All we need is, well ... our snowshoes!  You strap them right on your snow boots, and off you go.  Snowshoeing started as a way for us to keep our sanity in the snow, by keeping gear to a minimum.  Since then it has become one of our favorite activities in the snow.

We've come to love snowshoeing because it allows us to live the mountains in winter in a way that no other activity can.  It allows us to go off the well-traveled trails, and to walk in the woods and above the tree-line, where no other people are, surrounded only by high mountain nature.  For Tom and me it's a way to teach the boys - and Rebecca when she's a little older - what the mountains are about, at least for us.

You walk slowly, at your own pace, and are able to see the animal tracks and the nature blanketed in snow, and all the details that you'd miss if you went any faster.  You walk slowly in solitude, and you hear the sound of the snow falling from the treetops, the sound of the wind.  You walk slowly and with some effort: the higher you go, the more magnificent your view over the valley becomes, and the further you see.

In the evenings we read from a book I picked up before leaving, a collection of short stories about mountaneering.  I was afraid the physical and mental extremes they describe might be too strong for the boys, but they seemed to be more interested than scared.  Among our favorites were a Michael Crichton account of his climbing Mt Kilimanjaro, which becomes a way of measuring his will, and which can be found in here; this story by Guy de Maupassant about a winter in the High Alps (we all found it really engaging); a slightly creepy account of the passion and ambition in mountaneering taken to extremes on K2 by Jon Krakauer (here is a sample of his writing); and the beautiful story "Iron" by Primo Levi, which tells about an unusual friendship that grows in the authentic solitude of the Alps (in this collection).