Skiing’s benevolence emerges in the land of fire and ice
WORDS • DONNY O’NEILL | PHOTOS • ADAM KLINGETEG *unless otherwise noted
The gray-haired Russian woman in the window seat tapped me on the shoulder.
“Look,” she gestured toward the window. “So much snow.”
There must be a lot, as this is the first she’s acknowledged my presence in the eight-plus hour flight that preceded this interaction. I leaned forward, gave a nod to her bear of a husband in the middle seat and looked out.
I’d gazed at photos prior to the trip, naturally, but even as we descended toward the peninsula, 30-plus hours into my voyage around the world, I was unsure what to expect coming into my final destination. Russian relations with the United States certainly caused internal trepidation to travel anywhere in the world’s biggest country. From everything I’d been told, though, this wasn’t remotely like western Russia.
Out the window, it was white: A ghostly sheet extended as far as the eye could see. Past the wing stood Avachinsky, an 8,993-foot active stratovolcano adorned in its winter coat. I wiped the disbelief and wearisome travel from my eyes and sat back against my seat. The Aeroflot attendant’s voice came over the speakers and conveyed in Russian what I assumed was the announcement of our final descent.
I glanced once more at the foreboding leviathan framed in the window as the attendant confirmed my suspicions in English. Soon after, we touched down in a land where the opposing elements of fire and ice collide: Kamchatka.
Fischer Skis invited me, ski shop representatives from Washington, Switzerland and Austria and one other media member here, to the far northeastern peninsula of Russia. What was originally billed as a product test in a mostly unheard of, faraway land, soon presented itself as so much more.
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Posted from FREESKIER
