"It's the healthy mountain air!": Sledding in the Alps

In the story Heidi, Clara goes to the Swiss Alps and recovers her health, and so did I this past weekend.

Last week I had a cold, which kept me inside for most of the week when I wasn't at class, but I decided I couldn't miss an opportunity to go to Switzerland for the first time with IES on Saturday. We drove the three hours to Grindelwald, a small town in the Swiss Alps (the Bernese Mountains, to be specific). There is a large skiing area all over the mountains around Grindelwald, so we took a gondola up to a stop called First (7,113 feet) and were given sturdy wooden sleds with metal runners. We couldn't begin our sledding from First, however, because of avalanche warnings, so we went down one spot to a place called Schreckfeld (6,414 feet, also what a great name) and were told we could sled down to Bort (5,150 feet).

I did this route a total of three times. At first, I had difficulty steering. You had to put your feet on the runners and push down in the opposite direction you wanted to turn. At higher speeds little shifts in body weight changed the direction of the sled, and at some points the trail took sudden, sharp turns and featured drops into big snow fields. We also had to cross skiiing paths at some points...my friend lost his sled down one of these tracks at one point, which was humorous in a dangerous way. I was waiting at the bottom of a turn for people to catch up when I see him running down the hill, his sled in front of him. Once you let go of a sled on the side of the mountain, it keeps sliding down a long way. Anyways, I tried to jump in front of it to stop it, but it ran over my legs and fell down into the skiing area, prompting a lot of shouts of "achtung!" from the people on the slope until it disappeared from view. We never actually found the sled.

So the first time down featured a lot of stopping and awkward braking with my feet. The trail got steeper and steeper the further down we went, running along by little mountain cabins and trees and even a little Alpine stream. The day was warm, so there were a lot of other sledders on our trail, and I heard something like 5,000 people were on the slopes that day in total. We rode the gondolla back up to Schreckfeld and went down again. Each time down got easier, and eventually I picked up speed and made it around some corners easily. I was no expert by the end, however, and still crashed a few times (luckily the snow on the sides of the trail was really deep, so any impact was soft). I never got comfortable enough to entirely let go and stop braking on the steepest parts.

Being in the Alps was wonderful. I have never been in or around mountains that high, and certainly never in winter. You could always see the giant, 12,000+ feet peaks to one side, Wetterhorn, Schreckhorn, and Eiger, complete with ice-blue glaciers.


I did end up feeling a lot better after being outside and active for most of the day, and now my cold has almost subsided. Sledding was the last weekend trip IES had planned for us, so this coming weekend I am staying in Freiburg. Next week is an IES trip to Hamburg, and then the week after that IES classes start already!