An 18-year-old Spanish snowboard lost his way in lowlight while riding the French Alps. Heavy fog prevented search parties from finding him, and the youth had apparently given up when the weather cleared long enough for a helicopter to spot him. He was only 500 meters from the road, and they say it was a miracle he didn’t run into any cliffs in the 1,275 meters he’d made his way down the mountainside.

I managed to get lost in lowlight at Solitude about a week after I moved to Utah, but my favorite fog experience was when a chair stopped at Alta halfway between lift towers. The fog obscured the ground, and you could only see the cable stretching off in each direction. There were no trees or any shapes beyond your feet to break up the horizon. If you stared in one direction long enough, you’d feel vertigo. It was like skydiving without the wind or mortal terror.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 7:27 am and is filed under Skiing, Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.