Monday December 10^th

Today I went to Damüls to ski for the second time. I took the bus to met up with a group of friends from my school. From my class was Constantin, Mattias, and Adi. And from the 8^th class was Thomas Maurer, Gabriel, Thomas Willingsdorfer, and Paul. We had to switch buses in Bezau (after about 45 minutes), then it was 10 minutes to Mellau. Earlier, Mellau and Damüls were separate resorts, but they recently combined to make one mega-resort. It was absolutely massive, and I couldn’t even tell how many lifts there were. There was a combination of rope tows, chair lifts and gondolas around the whole mountain, and it was unbelievable to ski there. At one point we were up three lift rides, and you could go another level up too. It seemed never ending, and I have no clue where we were on the mountain. Luckily my friends had an idea of where we were. The snow was unbelievable. I was getting face shots and pow runs all morning, although it was really flat light. A couple times we strayed from the main paths and got a little stuck. Well, I got really stuck. At one point I was all the way down in the bottom of a gully up to my chest in snow (since I took off my skis to climb out). The others were similarly stuck but used the good judgement to climb out earlier. I ended up being the last one out and barely scrambled up and out of the gully. Regardless, it was a great run with pow the whole way down. We went into one of the many lodges for lunch, then continued on. Since it was a Monday, so one was there and we had pretty much to whole mountain to ourselves. I am not sure why, but school was canceled that day – fine with me. At around 2:30 the wind really picked up. It was blowing us sideways, and we battled it until we got inside the gondola building. We didn’t feel like getting lost in the snow storm, so we called it a day. It took about 25 minutes to get back down with the gondolas anyway, so by the time we were down we only had about 20 minuted before the bus came. We spent it throwing snowballs and hanging out in a nearby café, then finally took the bus back to Bezau and eventually back to Dornbirn and home. It was an unbelievable day, great snow, and a huge resort with friends will never disappoint.