mayrhofen IV: schneeschuhwandern

It turns out that snowshoeing near Tux, Austria is less like a pleasant stroll through the snowy hills and more like clawing your way up the side of the mountain. When you reach the top, you shiver on the porch of someone's cabin (your Austrian guide, who spent the morning snowshoeing in pants that unzipped to show his thighs and his tiny army green boxer-briefs, assures you that even though he doesn't know whose cabin this is, it's all good). You put on all the extra clothes you've got and chow down on the most delicious belegtes Brötchen of your life, plus tea, cookies, and Schnapps that tastes the way pine trees smell. You look at the mountains, which even in the fog are gorgeous, unreal, and you think about the village your guide told you about earlier, as you were passing a tiny chapel in the snow: a village big enough to have its own movie theater, entirely buried in an avalanche in the '70s. Twenty-odd people died; the chapel is in their honor. And you'll think how crazy it is that a whole village can disappear in an instant, like something out of a myth, like Atlantis, the lost city under the sea. There's very little danger of avalanches at the moment, your guide assures you. There's not enough snow on the mountains right now.

The way down from the cabin is more like what you were expecting out of this experience: for the majority of the return trip, you'll follow the road that winds gently back into the valley, cutting into the woods only once the snow cover gives way to icy slick. By the time you're back at the van, in spite of how you're sweaty and tired and a little bit freezing, longing for a change of clothes and a shower, you'll be thinking about how you understand it better now, the appeal of the mountains in winter, thinking maybe you'd love to do this again.