PoWWow, the hand driven snow plough

I know myself too well, I was absolutely sure that I wouldn't be able to stay at home with my knee up, and instead leapt at another chance to ski with Dan after an unusually efficient morning service. Down in the valley it was a darkened grey suppression of clouds, but as soon as we hit a thousand metres or so we suddenly found ourselves piercing through an eerily flat layer of sky to be cast above the murky world below + be launched into a catastrophically utopian dream land of a perfectly blue sky + penetratingly perfectly white mountains hosting spiraling + inviting promises of freshly bashed carpeted pistes for us to weave our way down. Still early in the day, the re-charging sun had not yet hit this awestruck adventure land, but with every descent, the dramatic rigid shadows of the north mountains would dip a little more allowing sporadic floods of beams to cast their gold upon a sliding Smith- so at peace + content with every imaginable thought and peering back with such joy to see a dramatic shadow of a replicated but enlarged version of my lucky self.

I'm glad I've found an out-of-work, out-of-ski project to be getting on with, which has snapped up today's position of top photo : s n o w p l o u g h i n g : is a great + truly satisfying past time, as well as potentially l i f e s a v i n g. A melodramatic + grandiose take on it, perhaps, but I've been working for the past two days on a particularly scary blind spot that the efficient mass road ploughers have created at the end of our drive way. Genius, I thought smugly to myself when the hand ploughing project began, but I have to admit, my efforts have yet to come into fruition and there is still a 50/50 chance that the nose of our people carrier could be taken out at the first moment of joining the road of the reckless + insane driving from the locals. . it shall continue though [always in my time off, what a saddo] and the snow is reaching optimum sculpting levels so perhaps I'll try + carve a goat.

We went out for t w o double dates that evening in wooden bars surrounded by old extreme climbing photographs from the fourties. One Romanian couple + one New Zealand. Back2back. L u s h.