A White-Wonderland Weekend Walk

Up about a 1500 vertical meter mountain with tennis rackets on our feet and big smiles on our faces. And I guess you could say we adapted to the local conditions in Kosovo as well. Since the our local ski resort has stopped running the lifts (due to lack of Albanian tourists post independence in this Serbian enclave) we decided we would spend a day walking up it instead. We couldn't have picked a more perfect, warm sunny day for both of us to get the work-out of a lifetime and fall in love with a new sport, together, for the first time.

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Now its not as if we could hop down to our local sports store and rent a pair of these high-tech walking shoes. This took several weeks of sending emails to my friends in the international community before my friend Gail offered her pair to Pranvera and she connected me with a long time British expat here who also had a pair for me. As he and I were arranging a pick-up from his house in Brez I received a call from him saying that not only had he checked the blog to see who I was but he happened to notice Pranvera, who he had worked and lived with just after the war during their days at OXFAM. And it had been quite some time since they had reconnected since Tim had left for awhile. Small, small place. But even more perfect since we offered to take Tim down to the mountain where he just hung out for the day in his cabin and he guided Pranvera and I to the most perfect spot to begin our journey, up.

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Enlarge the photo on the right to see the tracks that we created walking up the mountain

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These things are actually easier than they look. Once you size them up, selected the gear and food we may need for the day we just started walking through the forest. The neat thing about snow shoes are that you make your own trail. We just wandered in and out of the trees picking a line we thought might be a little easier to float upon. There were certainly much softer sections of snow that we sunk into but for the most part you get good at noticing which areas look more frozen in order to keep our grip.
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And it was SO darn quiet. Once we stopped our snow crunching to hear the thundering of our own heats against our chest, you couldn't hear any other sound. We had almost no wind and the scattered clouds offered some protection against the beating sun. As you can tell from the photos Pranvera tends to get a bit hotter than I and she received a very nice tan from the double intensity of direct light and the snow reflection.

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It was hard to believe we were still in Kosovo with the winter wonderland around us. Of course in the rest of Kosovo spring is already popping up. But up here, still plenty of snow to play. And we tracked up and up where we were at almost 50 degree angles letting the spikes due their job to help get us to the top. And once there, we found a small green bush island to sunbath, eat and rest. Words and pictures can't even begin to capture the feeling of freedom and openness that only mother nature can provide.

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And we thought going up was going to be the hard part. WRONG. Since I have only gone down snow mountains on my snowboard, I had no idea how slow and challenging each step would be to make sure we did not slip. With the snow a bit softer from the sun and the still very intense angle we tried to side traverse down but not only does this start to hurt you feet more, it doesn't allow the spikes to completely drive into the snow and stop you from speeding down the mountain. My heart was thumping as much from our climb as on our descent after Pranvera slipped. She was a very good sport about it and calmed me down so we could spot each other slowly making the way safely all the way back the car.

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It was great to not have to retrace our steps as we trail blazed in 4 hours a path to the jeep. Before calling it a day we drove up to the empty resort to sit outside of the coffee houses and sip bad, overpriced coffee looking up towards the peak we just summited. Not to mention the bonus of playing with 7 newborn Sharri pups. Such a perfect weekend walk:-)

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