Last week I went on a 5 day trip to Åre to go skiing! We left on Sunday (3/2/14). It was about a 3 hour bus ride from Trondheim to Åre. We got 3 and a half days of skiing in and I was out skiing around 7 hours every day! We got to stay in some pretty nice cabins that were a five minute walk from the nearest ski lift and not far from the Åre city center.

As a part of the trip we got a 3 day pass (Monday – Wednesday), but when we got there we found out that the pass also let us go out for night skiing Sunday night so we rushed to get into our cabins and get our rentals. They didn’t have many runs lit up at night so near our cabins there were only really two options, a really easy run, or a couple pretty tricky runs (for me at least…). The mountains around Åre are so much bigger than Minnesota that it was pretty tough to get started. When I got close to the start of the slope it felt like I was walking up to the edge of a cliff. I went down one of the harder runs that first night and when I fell I could not stop sliding! I just had to wait until I finally made it down the steep part to stand up again.

As a comparison I looked up to the biggest ski hill in Minnesota, Lutsen Mountain. The vertical distance from the top of the mountain to the bottom is 825 feet (250 meters). Åre has a vertical distance of 3,380 feet (1030 meters) which was at the slopes ending right next to our cabin.

After the first full day of skiing I finally was able to get a feel for skiing again and could handle most of the hills. I even managed a couple black diamond runs, although they were very short and I didn’t even realize they were until I looked at the map afterwards. The entire time the weather was incredible too! It was around 32 fahrenheit (0 celsius) and really sunny the entire the entire trip! There was just one morning where it was kind of cloudy and it made it very difficult to see at the top of the mountain, but it cleared up later in the morning. It might even have been a bit too warm as there were a few places that had small bare patches and the trails got a bit slushy by the end of the day. At end of the day the really popular slopes had moguls from all of the skiers and slushy snow. It got really hard to ski. I went out right after the slopes opened each day at around 8:15 so I could ski on good slopes for as long as possible.

Now that I’m home again I have a lot of homework to catch up on before Katie comes to visit next week and we go to Tromsø…