Do you know this? The summer vacation is over, the evenings are getting cooler and the daylight less and less, the leaves turn from green to orange to red and finally fall from the trees, the last Oktoberfest beer has been drunk and in the morning the first fog settles over the fields. It's fall. And that's when I start to look forward to winter. At first I say goodbye to summer full of melancholy, but then I keep looking at the latest ski models, get the first buyers' guide and make plans for the season. At first, I'm still euphoric: "Everything will be better this winter and I'll be skiing every weekend and maybe even a few times before work." Until the reality of Munich catches up with me: traffic jams from the A8 slip road to the end of the A8, straight on to the Zillertal and back again. In the ski resort, there's more jostling and queuing and also on all the ski tours that start in the Munich area.
While I'm sitting in the car, I keep thinking to myself how insane the whole thing is. Getting stuck in traffic jams, chasing exhaust fumes out of the exhaust pipe and then skiing for a few lousy hours on the last remnants of glaciers or freshly snow-covered slopes. Is it still worth it? And isn't skiing, the sport I've idolized since I was three years old, just a dusty dinosaur that's best put in a museum today? Do Fridays for Future demonstrators go skiing? Am I even allowed to do that? Does it make sense for me to blow millions of liters of water into the sky to make snow on the slopes? To literally blow CO2 out of the window on the way there just because I like gliding down a slope on two boards? I could just start something right from my front door and not have to drive to the mountains every weekend. Gravel biking, for example. Snowshoeing (well, joke) or, I don't know, just hiking, walking, cross-country skiing?
