21.1.16

First self-organized daytrip at Jaegersberg

Lessons of the day

Also a slow round of skiing can be fun. Frozen lakes are awesome, although scary. Don’t forget your food! – Again!

Main part

“Go skiing at Jegersberg and start a fire” – Well that are some easy instructions for a daytrip. And the perfect blue sky motivated us even more to go outside. Unfortunately, because of an incoming cold I decided to take it slowly on the skiing part. So I went for one lap on the cross-country touring-skis together with Max. Although the lap is only around 4km long, it is a challenging one going up and down nearly all the time. On the way we met Michael who was skiing on his own. When we reached the lake at the end of the lap, we decided to take the risk and try to cross the ice. So I stepped onto the frozen lake, did some tests with the pole first and then with jumping carefully, always having Joeys’ soaked shoes in my mind. The ice was seemed to be thick enough, so I started walking. With the sun in my back, blue sky and a landscape covered in snow in front of me and the beautiful silence of nature, I once again realized why I love winter and cross-skiing so much. What a breath taking experience!

As soon as we reached the tracks again, we met Julian and Martin who were skiing on their normal cross-country skis. We all stopped and stared at the huge icicles that build up at the rocks right beside the tracks. After a short picture session, trying to capture all this memorisable moments, we finished the lap.

Skiing is done, so now it’s time for some fire action at the start. It’s the big flat area with the small 500m lap where the Norwegians took us on Monday. Unfortunately, Firestarter Chris wasn’t around, so Max and I had to do it on our own. Because we didn’t bring any wood logs, we spread out and searched for some dry wood to enlighten a fire. And we found the leftover logs from Monday, what a luck. But we still needed something different to get it started. In nature, the best thing you can get for that use is birch bark (that sounds awkward, I doubt that it’s the correct spelling – doesn’t matter, in case it’s wrong I am insisting on a foreign language bonus!). The first try failed miserably because we didn’t use enough and we couldn’t find a spot that was not covered with snow. So we went into the woods again collected almost a ton of birch bark to try it again, and (“tadah!”) we got some fire! At this time, the social fire loafers Julian and Martin decided to show up after almost burning the ski tracks.

Now let’s get out the food and start barbequing… but wait a minute, were is my food?! Damn it, again! Luckily Max showed some empathy and shared his food with the suffering man I was at this moment. Thank you! While another group started a fire next to us, we decided to leave after 15 minutes of bread- and hand-warming and I could finally go home to get healthy again.