Well, it kind of works...
And I did say I'd tell it if this was chosen...

How I came within sneezing distance of an icy death.

*The impatient should skip down to the next wibbly lines*

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First things first: I like skiing. In fact, I really like skiing. I'll use any excuse to go, even if it's just a dry slope. Unfortunately, I tend to overestimate my own abilities.

Anyway, earlier this year when I heard my uni snowsports club was putting on a day trip to Glenshee, I jumped at the chance. What I had forgotten was that the other members of the club were all quite a lot better than me, and were snowboarders rather than skiers.

I also forgot to take my goggles. This will become important later.

Anyway, we got there nice and early and spent a while getting kitted up. For those that haven't had to change clothes in a minibus with the doors open and the windchill at -10, I can't recommend it. Anyway, we headed off into the mountains and all was well for a few hours. Loads of powder (that really fluffy snow that you can't make snowballs from) and while I had a few big crashes from trying to keep up with the others, crashing on powder doesn't hurt. Normally.

Around 11am we had reached quite a distance from the centre of the resort (Glas Maol for those that know it), onto a bit of mountain that was effectively off piste. I wasn't comfortable with the suggested route down the mountain, so I decided that I could work my way down further off piste to a shallow gully further down the mountain and get back to the lift from there.

It's here that the gambling comes in, because I didn't have any kind of survival equipment, I didn't know the terrain and I didn't have the phone numbers of any of my snowsports friends on me.

So I started skiing down the mountain towards what I believed to be the rough position of the gully. I say rough position, because I didn't have my goggles with me and it was snowing fairly heavily as well as being misty. As any skiers will know, you can't ski in those conditions without goggles. I was trying it in sunglasses.

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*The impatient can start reading from here*

Condensed version of the above - I went off-piste skiing in Scotland on my own.

Anyway, I was happily pottering along, my thought processes running somewhere along the lines of "Hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmOHSHITWHATTHECUNTINGFUCKAAAAAAAAAAARRRRGH".

I had, in the whiteout, entirely overlooked the start of the gully and plunged over the edge. It wasn't shallow either - about 50-60 degrees. Far steeper than it looked from a distance. I built up far too much speed far too quickly, and panicked. I threw myself to the side just as I smashed into a snowbank. My left ski released as it was supposed to. My right ski didn't. And when that happens, all the twisting forces go through the weakest link. In this case, my right knee.

In short, I was now lying in the bottom of a mostly invisible gully a long way from the main ski run, with no way of calling for help (no phone signal) and a fucked up knee. For the first 5 minutes of lying there, I thought I might be in for the long hall in terms of waiting for help. Fortunately after about 10 minutes I found that it would just about support my weight, albeit at the cost of a fair bit of pain. However, I wasn't safe yet. I still had to get off the damn mountain.

The more observant of you may be wondering why there was a gully on this mountainside in the first place. The more clever of you may have realised that this would be because it contained a stream at the bottom. I had plunged into the very top of the gully, about 20ft above where the stream came out from under the snow. Had I gone in 20ft further on, my situation would have been far worse.

I couldn't go back up the mountain because I couldn't bend my knee properly. I had to go forward or nowhere. I ended up shuffling along the side of a 70 degree gully in nearly waist deep snow, my heart in my mouth every time a ski shifted or slipped downhill. Because if I fell, I was going to go headfirst into the stream. And with the weather conditions and my injury, it's highly possible that if that had happened, I wouldn't be here to type this now. Fortunately I didn't realise this at the time - I just wanted to get off the mountain and find my friends.

I did eventually get off the mountain and somehow back to the minibus. I couldn't walk at all later that evening once my knee had stiffened up. Happily it has now healed, but I was walking with a limp for almost a month.



That's my biggest gamble - stupidity led me to gamble with my life.

Won't be doing that again.

At least, until the next time I go to Glenshee...
( MatJ LOOK, Thu 7 May 2009, 14:30, Reply)