Tour.

Oh the tour.

It got us here. It got us fed.

We are not on the paperwork for the Miramonte.

I knew I should have checked but my agent assured me I was at the Miramonte.

Even gave me a travel schedule with locations relative to the Miramonte and I had been impressed.

Not on the list.

I wonder when Nancy will get into town and wonder where I'm really staying.

Out comes the phone book, they call the Rezia. Yes, we'll be staying there.

Fabulous. Just 700m away.

I envision future generations making an Olympic event, the uphill baggage schlep.

Counter jockey is nice enough to give us a ride in the company truck.

Counter girl at the Rezia is fluent enough to cleanly check us in. She's marginally fluent past that but what do you want, conversation? She's a ruthlessly competent front desk staffer.

I'm sure there's some title for that.

Room is small but not tiny. Appropriate for a four-star hotel. Small, clean. Little portico one can walk out onto and watch the grooming being done.

This isn't about this. This is about the tour.

Tour was supposed to have the passes for us at the front desk but the girl looks at me like I am perhaps crazy. Where the hell are the passes?

Down to the Baita. Plenty of passes to be had. Just like Disneyland.

Still, its a good few blocks further than I'd planned on burning this morning. I'd been promised eggs in my basket, damnit.

There were schedules that never arrived, other passes that never showed up.

None of this would have been too much of an issue had I not had to sort of pluck my way through a conversation with the nice people at the desk.

Was there anything left for us in our box. Papers? Passes? Tickets? Another word for tickets? A diagram of what tickets would look like in the US? That? In our box? I swear I'm not crazy, can you just look?

Ski conditions are pretty amazing for mostly man-made snow. They are blowing it throughout the day. You can look up from the bottom of the hill and see these plumes jetting out.

We meet the short blonde lady who is kind of typical Sierra high-adventure lady. She telemarks of all things. Looks pretty aggro about it, too. Telemarks.

rrrrr.

"Howzit?" we ask.

"Boring. All wide and flat."

"Cruiser stuff?"

"Sure, cruiser, if you like that."

"Not so exciting, though? What had you been hoping for?"

"Big turns, terrain, something."

From an uphiller perspective I can see how you would think this so.

From a downhiller's perspective its the ultimate frozen wave. Several thousand feet of vertical. Takes you a goodly while to climb it and you'd be hard pressed to run the whole thing more than once but for me its kind of a thing of pride. Top to the bottom, end the day right. Push until you've got just a little left and save that for next time.

Bormio is massive, fourteen minutes top to bottom nearly all spent in free-fall. Huge lanes, slopes nearly empty this time of year, midweek. Every so often the road turns and suddenly you are looking at another one of the world's most amazing vistas. The valley is so weird, so bleak that every turn makes something new appear. Makes one wonder what will be next upcoming.

Bottom is fabulous, a little thin towards the bottom but nothing risky. You float all the way down to the valley bottom where you wish you could just get into a righteous tuck and find oneself across the river.

Its almost that good.

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