Winter Sports in Switzerland

by E. F. Benson

The foregoing is a complete compendium of all that it is necessary to know or do, when tobogganing on an ordinary road. It is as simple as walking and generally quicker. The same, in the main, applies to the use of luges on an artificially-made run. But every artificial run implies the idea of racing, and thus the object is to get down it as quickly as possible. But every artificial run has turns in it, and the idea is to get round these turns without capsize and with as little loss of speed as possible. The outside of these turns is therefore banked up (i.e. if the turn is to the right, the left side of the track is banked up, and vice versa), so that you do not (if you manage properly) run out of the track, but climb the bank and descend again into the track. But if you do not manage properly, one of three things will happen to you.

(i) You go over the bank and are heavily spilled. This is fatal if you want to win a race, unless everybody else does the same.

(ii) You upset on the bank. This is not necessarily so fatal, unless you entirely part company with your toboggan, which then finishes triumphantly without you.

(iii) In excess of caution, you diminish your speed so much before you get to the bank that you merely crawl round the bend. This is moderately fatal.

But we need not waste more time over artificial snow-runs. They are only a compendious form of road-running, and what is necessary in the way of steering and judgment of pace on them, is equally true with regard to such fine natural runs as the Klosters road. Here there are no artificial banks to keep the runner in his course. He has to get around the corners by judicious steering, and crawling when necessary, and, above all, by adjustment of weight. On the ordinary luge or Swiss toboggan there is little adjustment of weight that can be made, but it is a very different affair when you negotiate the same road on racing toboggans, namely skeletons, which are also used on ice-runs.

Here, instead of this little high wooden platform on which you sit, there is a very low framework supported on round steel runners, blunt nosed in front, and instead of sitting on it you lie on it, face downwards. The runners, sharply bent upwards in front, return and form the support of the low frame, and you grasp these with your hands, and lie down with arms bent or extended as required. But the cushion on which you recline moves backwards and forwards in the manner of a sliding seat, so that you can lie with legs right out behind the base of the machine, and can use great part of your weight, inclining it to one side or the other of the toboggan, in order to get it round curves. Similarly, the hands have an immense leverage behind them, and with one foot lying out behind and raking the snow, a curve can be made at high speed, which it would be impossible to get round on a Swiss toboggan without heavy braking and great loss of velocity. When riding a skeleton, the toes of the boots are fitted with toothed irons, so that they can be used together as brakes, or singly, in order to make the toboggan curve in the required direction. The runners of these toboggans are not rectangular like those on luges, but of circular shape, thus producing the minimum of friction on their travelling surface. Even on snow-tracks these are capable of tremendous speed, though that speed does not approach what they compass on frozen ice-runs, where they travel almost frictionless.

Apart from the “storm and stress” of racing, there is a wonderful pleasure, if the track is smooth and trafficless, in this swift gliding over frozen snow, and one of the most romantic of experiences in all the gamut of motion is tobogganing by moonlight. Never will the writer forget one such night on the Klosters road. We had sleighed up from Davos, a party of friends, to Wolfgang, on one of those magical nights when no breath of wind stirred the lightest jewels of hoar-frost on the pines, when the moon was full, and the stars burned like diamonds aflame. All the way up, after dinner, there had been talk and laughter, and standing ready to go, we arranged that there should be two minutes’ pause between the despatch of the toboggans, and one by one we slid off into the unspeakable silence of the Alpine night. It so happened that I was the last to go, and for two minutes I waited at the head of the track in a stillness that is unimaginable. When I started there was in all probability not a living soul within half a mile, and the nearest was sliding swiftly further away every moment. For a little way the track lay open to the full blaze of the zenithed moon, but soon it plunged beneath the impenetrable canopy of pines. It was possible to see the white glimmer of the road ahead, otherwise there was nothing visible. Then, with the suddenness of a curtain withdrawn, the blackness became a celestial and ineffable glory of close burning constellations, with the full disc of the moon shining imperially among them. Far below, distant and dim, I could see the lights of Klosters, and half-longed to reach them, in order to get out of this awful and burning and frozen solitude, half-longed that my travel might be lengthened into an eternity of wheeling stars and flying road. Sometimes it seemed that I was rushing headlong through space, sometimes it seemed that I was stopping absolutely still, and that it was this unreal world of trees and road and bridges and banks that hurled itself by me, and that the stars and I were the steadfast things. Once the sudden roar of a stream over the bridge of which I passed sounded loud and menacing, but in a moment that was past, and the hissing spray of frozen snow coming from the bows of my toboggan was the only sound audible. And then the lights of Klosters gleamed larger and nearer, and this wonderful swift solitude was over.

(As a matter of fact, I had an awful spill by the cabbage garden corner: but though that was very vivid at the time, there remains nothing of it, except the fact, in my memory. It would have been more romantic, but less realistic, not to have mentioned it.)

Ice-runs

There is one Mecca: there is one St. Peter’s: there is one Cresta. As is Mecca to the Mohammedan, as is St. Peter’s to the Catholic, so is the Cresta run at St. Moritz to the tobogganer. It is the ice-run. There may be others, and there certainly are, but what does the Cresta care? It has a cachet which no other possesses.