(Lenk, Switzerland)
As we prepared to leave Lenk for the bright lights of Zürich, I decided to take a look at something not typically associated with a skiing vacation: statistics.
A website called skiline.cc lets you connect your digital lift passes to an on-line account. By entering the unique code on your ski pass, all of your skiing data can be collected in one place. Each of the resorts I visited this year participated in this program. The result: I now know exactly how many lifts I took each day, how many kilometres I skied, and how many vertical metres I skied!
I’m glad that I didn’t fully explore this website while I was still skiing. I think I might have felt some subtle pressure, especially on the last day, to “set records” before it was time to return to Canada. As it turns out, the data pretty much supports my guesses about the relative intensity of each day.
In total, my 9 on-slope days in Switzerland had me taking 201 lifts, skiing 455 kilometres, and accumulating 72,481 vertical metres (237,798 vertical feet). No wonder I was always so hungry: I was averaging more than 50 km per day! Some statistics were useless: I was the only Canadian registered on skiline.cc at Lenk this year. I apparently also won the “gold medals” for most vertical metres in one day by a Canadian at both Wengen and Gstaad. But my overall totals for those resorts were not best-in-class for Canadian skiers.
It was interesting to see that I skied a formidable 71 km on our deep powder day at Betelberg. We arrived early, caught the very last lift up, and didn’t have a particularly long lunch. However, despite this being the “farthest” I skied in any one day, it was not the biggest vertical day. I only accumulated 8,088 vertical metres that day, which I can attribute primarily to the relatively easy slopes at Betelberg.
In terms of vertical, our biggest day was at Kleine-Scheidegg/Männlichen/Wengen, when I managed to accumulate a healthy vertical drop of 10,240 metres (almost 34,000 feet) over the day, despite only skiing a distance of 54 km. This also makes sense: we spent a lot of time on steeper slopes such as the legendary “Oh God!” and “Black Rock”.
One nice surprise on our last day at Lenk-Adelboden, as you can see from the photos, was discovering the Chüebodmi restaurant on a little-travelled piste near Sillerenbühl. We wondered why there was a Japanese flag flying above it, but upon investigating we realized that they specialized in ramen! It was *very* rustic (no WC, just an outhouse!), but ramen turned out to be the perfect lunch for an active day on the slopes.
Speaking of surprises, we also had a couple of them in Zürich…stay tuned for the details!