We arrived in Munich to fresh snow, and a few days later set out with some of her friends and relatives for the Blomberg rodelbahn near the town of Bad Tölz. Still jetlagged, I dozed in the backseat of the car until Steffi jabbed me with her elbow.
“See that?’’ she said, as we pulled into a parking lot. Outside was a statue of a colossal sled propped up vertically. Behind it was a chairlift, the bottom of a ski run, and a picturesque mountain covered in snow-laden trees.
Steffi arranged the details. I waited near the chairlift while she got us lift tickets and 3-foot-long wooden runner sleds, descendants of the type Bavarians used in earlier times to move lumber and hay down snowy slopes. These have a thin protective strip of plastic or metal on the runners’ edges.
As an avid skier, the routine felt normal: Drive to a mountain, buy a lift ticket, and ride up in a chairlift in a sort of meditative calm. But as we rose between thick stands of fairy-tale pine trees, the reality of what I was doing snapped into focus: I was on a chairlift with a sled. We were a long way up. Was I really going to slide back down?
“Is this where we get off?’’ I asked Steffi as we approached the lift’s middle station. “Nope,’’ she said with a smile.
So up we went, to the top of the mountain, where the sunlit trees glowed white and yellow against a blue sky. A fresh powder sparkled like broken glass, and squeaked underfoot. In the distance, I could see a mostly flat landscape dotted with farms.
I watched a few people glide down the 15-foot-wide path before I sat on my sled and pushed off. Everything was fine as I zoomed through the first steep section of the path. Then it turned left, and in spite of everything I tried, I continued going straight - right into a snowbank. Steffi’s brother was waiting nearby with advice.
