It's been freezing cold for the past few weeks and snowed on/off again all last week. The flakes were usually too small to do much of anything, but we awoke on Saturday morning with a few inches, hurray! Unfortunately, it started to melt right away, then re-froze into black ice because the weather turned cold again.
Hoping to find better snow in the mountains, we headed to the Jura in the canton of Solothurn on Sunday for an afternoon of show-shoeing. The drive west took less than an hour. We parked at the Balmberg ski school, which was comprised of a few hills with T-bars, a "magic carpet" ride and tons of toddlers in helmets learning to ski! It was actually right up Matt's alley since it was a total bunny slope (not much of an incline) and he still doesn't know how to ski, but we opted to snow-shoe as planned. There were a ton of families sledding as well ("Schlitteln"). Surprisingly, it was quite crowded even though the weather and snow conditions were not great. We even saw a guy on short skis being pulled by 2 Huskies; haven't seen that before!
We couldn't find the trail we read about, but ended up walking across one of the ski slops and proceeded pretty much uphill through the woods for about an hour - we seemed to be going up a "cat-track" (easy way down for alpine skiers). It opened up nicely at the top but it was too foggy to see much of the surrounding mountains. The weather perked up in the afternoon and the sun peeked through for a while, which was lovely. On our way back down, the snow was even slushier and the trees were dripping wet. We've been told it's still early in the season, so we're waiting on a good dump of the white stuff! Perhaps next month after the safari....
Llamas!
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