Velika dnina

Tired and angry!

Saturday 4:15 am. I am abruptly awoken by a bang of the kitchen door. Fotr keep the f....g noise down! Still half conscious, I come to conclusion that I decided to join Fotr, Mac and Marijan to a mountain skiing trip. I don't remember much for the next two hours, but I probably got dressed, got in the car and slept until we parked just under the first 180 degree turn on the Vrsic road. I woke up, put my equipment on and we started descending. Yes, descending, because in order to get to the slope under Velika dnina, you have to descend 50 meters, cross a nice mountain stream and walk past "Kekčeva dežela" and then around 2 km on nearly flat ground. Which is not as pleasant as it sounds, if you are wearing ski boots and a heavy back pack. To make things a bit more interesting, naturally, we took a short cut. And soon enough we were jumping over big rocks in our ski boots. Really adventurous, and stupid, since there was a nice walking route about 200m next to our adventure path. Thank you Fotr, for showing your reputation, as the navigator who always gets at least a little lost, still stands. Luckily we soon found a path, leading to Špik, and followed it for a while. Then we turned right and soon found ourselves digging our own footsteps in semi soft snow. Luckily there were four of us and we got through the steep and soft part quite fast. After that went forward to do the digging and was making very good progress almost until the top, when things turned for the worse. Other three had skis only an average dick size shorter than two meters, so they taped walking skins on them and made good progress. On the other hand I like shorter skis, that can't be used for walking on them, so I was soon digging my own footsteps into a relatively soft snow. On the altitude of 2300m, that is especially unpleasant, because that's where I usually start to feel the altitude. And if every third steps ends with your leg sinking at least, to knee deep in the snow, it soon becomes very psychological. So I did my fair share of swearing, which gave me almost unlimited determination. Which I stupidly used to climb higher than we originally planed and soon found myself climbing very crumbly rocks. It seems it is genetic, because Fotr followed me. After a while we finally realised that we wont be able to have lunch in the middle of a cliff so we dug a ledge in the snow and after 20 minutes of "Krnicar style" preparation we started our descent.

The slope is over 45 degress steep.

It was really steep and narrow so after initially sliding for 4 meters I finally made my first turn. I took Fotr some sliding and good nerves to get from our little trap, and then it was time for some serious skiing and fun.

The conditions were excellent. And so was the view...

However, I soon decided to try the snow under a rock wall. Of course I asked to Fotr to video my descent and because the snow was a combination of soft and hard there, that resulted in the most spectacular video of me crashing into the snow. Maybe I will get over my ego issues and post it here :). Lower down the mountain, the snow was a bit harder, so I had the chance to add some really pleasant carving turns to my descent. Of course I have a video of that too. After a very pleasant sandwich break, we continued skiing down until we reached a really steep and narrow part. So it took us a while to slide down and that gave me a chance to make some nice pictures.

Onward, the descent took us through a very interestingly shaped narrow valley where I really enjoyed skiing because the snow had lots of interesting bumps and shapes, so it was a lot of fun carving over and around them. But unfortunately we ran out of snow. So we had to carry our skis for around 500 meters through a maze of big boulders. This was quite tricky, so Mac ended up breaking his skiing pole and landing on his nose a couple of times. The rest of us had little more luck. After jumping over big rocks in snow boots, we found new straps of snow. So we put our skis back on. Nobody cared if the snow was only about 10cm deep and skiing was accompanied by squeaking noises coming from beneath the skis. When we reached the forest I even learned that you can ski over moss covered ground for some distance. We got quite close to the car, put the surprisingly undamaged skis back onto our backpacks and marched the last 50 meters uphill back to the car. The feeling of taking skiing boots off after 9 hours of walking and skiing can't be described. Neither can the smells.

Then we drove to Aljazev hram, a very pleasant bar with a view of Triglav and honoured the expedition with a very decent dose of beer.

Luckily I was driving back home, so I avoided carving incidents on dry land and hang over the next day.