Reader Story submitted by Kate Lapides. If you have a story you’d like to share with us, please send it to us.
It’s just past sunrise on an exquisite, luminous spring day in the Alps. I’m skinning up to a mountain pass situated high up in the Swiss resort of Verbier. Though early morning skins at my home ski town in Colorado are often solo encounters with tranquil, windswept forests, today’s climb is far from solitary. Several hundred fellow skiers surround me, all of them chattering happily away in Italian, Suisse German, and French. We’re all joyfully clambering over each other up this icy ski run, on a singular mission to gain an optimal vantage spot high on the alpine pass above us, long before the morning’s first café au lait.
Verbier
The pass we’re all scampering up, the Col de La Chaux, is part of a celebrated ski mountaineering race called the Patrouille des Glaciers (PDG). The biennial event began in 1943 as a training route for the Swiss Army; it has grown to become one of the most prestigious ski randonnée competitions in Europe. Over 4000 skiers will compete in this year’s PDG, ascending over 4000 meters (13,000 feet), flying down icy couloirs, and roping up to cross crevasses while racing the fifty-two kilometer course between the affluent ski towns of Zermatt and Verbier on tiny, lightweight skis. As the last major climb in this demanding event, the Col de la Chaux offers an intimate view of the exhausted endgames of the racers’ epic, overnight struggles.
Mona Merrill racing
At the Col, the scene is irrepressibly buoyant. Hundreds of spectators have already lined the ski track, exuberantly ringing enormous Swiss cowbells while shouting “Allez, Allez!” World Cup teams from Austria and Spain cruise by with legs churning like pistons in perfect sync; gray-haired Swiss schuss by more leisurely, deeply-lined faces reflecting a lifetime spent amid these peaks. Females compete in growing numbers, including, for the first time, a World Cup team comprised of three American women. A good friend, Mona Merrill, is racing on the team.
The animated scene at the Col reflects the wild popularity of randonnée in Europe, a continent where ski-obsessed French, Germans, Italians, Spaniards and Slovenians embrace this sport with a fanatic passion. A rich tradition of alpinism and skiing seemed to inform the very fabric of life here, creating a collective cultural psyche. It expresses itself as a profound connection to and joy amid these mountains.
To travel, I’m reminded, is always an act of enlarging our vision of the world. Being enveloped in the Euro passion for traversing steep and rugged terrain on the lightweight skis used in randonnée opened my eyes to new possibilities. Even better, the journey reinforced my core belief that there’s a unique spirit to people who embrace a life in the mountains on their own terms. 
Sport can give us unique insight into a culture; souvenirs are meant to remind us of the awareness we’ve grown. If I could bring back one memento from my ski trek in the Alps, this alpine version of cultural elation would be the one I’d return with. It was a captivating, heady elixir, a magic I wanted to bottle up, sneak through Customs, and bring home.
