Beagle Man Skis the Alps. With Five 30-somethings. And lives to tell about it . . .

“Write about him,” Derr said, nodding in the direction of Harry, the low-slung, fruit-sniffing beagle.  We were clustered around the baggage carousel at JFK, last stop on the Zermatt 6 Ski-the-Alps Tour, when Harry made his presence known by poking his snout into Geiger’s duffel.  “There’s your connection for Beagle Man,” Derr said.

The Young Dudes were adamant that the adventures of the Zermatt 6 be chronicled in my blog, but were aware there had to be a dog angle in there somewhere.  Alternate suggestions:  The muscular Lab we saw pulling a man — not some rosy-cheeked little Swiss kid, but a grown-up man — on a sled down Schluhmattstrasse; the ubiquitous St. Bernard, official mascot of the Swiss Alps; Kemba back home terrorizing my future daughter-in-law (eating her ponytail; towing her down the streets of Manhattan as if she were a water-skier) on the Saturday she sat for him.

But screw it.  This one doesn’t have to have dogs in it.  I’ve wanted to ski the Alps for most of my life, and now that I’ve done it, I want to talk about it.  It’s my blog.  Besides, I “teased” this escapade at the end of my last post (“The Two Kemba’s“), and I’m not about to leave my faithful followers hanging.

First things first: How did the (now world-famous hashtag) “Zermatt 6” come to be?  Way back when, the trip was just going to be a father-son deal, me and Matt, my oldest.  (Carol wanted no part of anything with the two words “Alps” and “skiing” in the same

sentence.)  Of course, middle son Greg quickly signed on, and while he’s usually incapable of traveling without his 20 closest buddies, for this trip he limited it to three:  Derr, Geiger, and Fighting Gillini.  (Youngest son Robby was ineligible; he’s a senior at USC and was left behind to tough it out in sunny L.A., or maybe Las Vegas, which appears to be his home-away-from-home.)

Oh, and a quick word about the skiing levels of the main characters, which will play a

pivotal role in our story:  Matt and Greg are both excellent, aggressive skiers who have, on top of that, become fitness freaks: both seem to be capable of skiing about 1,000 hours in a row without stopping to catch their breath.  Fighting Gillini was captain of the Staples ski racing team — yes, fast — though he does require a few more oxygen breaks than the Herman boys.  The oft-injured Derr, thank goodness, likes to catch a breather every few turns.  And Geiger?  Well let’s just say that while he possesses a stunning array of wonderful strengths — he’s hands-down the world’s funniest human being — skiing is not one of them.

Now I wasn’t going to mention this, but . . . full disclosure:  I missed Friday, the first ski day!  🙁  Altitude sickness.  (Could overdoing it at Papperla Pub Thursday night, on top of jet lag and very little sleep, possibly have factored in???  Nah . . .)  The Young Dudes assured me very nicely at least 100 times that I didn’t miss a whole lot — not much snow, hardly any lifts open, talk of demanding their money back — but I was still bummed.

Friday afternoon, though, it started snowing.  Hard.  And it kept snowing through Friday night.  And all day Saturday.  And into Saturday night . . .

To make up for my lost day, I was hell-bent on getting an early start Saturday.  But while you’d figure, from the above rankings, that I’d be hoping to ski with Derr and Geiger, they, along with Greg, were both part of the “Just one more beer” contingent, tending to return to the Jagerhof, HQ for the Zermatt 6, at 3AM or better — and Friday night had been one of their late nights.  So they slept in — which left me no choice but to ski with hard-core Matt and speed-demon Fighting Gillini — not a match made in heaven.  Oh, and did I mention that visibility was zero?  Total white-out.  But we skied.  Oh, did we ski.  For six-and-a-half hours, with just a tiny lunch break.  When there was a choice between a blue trail or a black, we went black.  When there was a choice between open cruiser and narrow chute, we went narrow chute.  When there was a choice between taking a break or keepin’ on trucking, we kept on trucking.  We’re talking vast terrain.  We’re talking endless trails.  Our final run of the day, from the peak of Gornergrat down to our home base in Zermatt, took 1 hour and 45 minutes.

I’ll admit that the boys made some generation-gap allowances.  Because of my fear of getting lost on this overwhelming and dizzying mountain, one of them always skied ahead of me and one behind.  They allowed me to stop and gasp for oxygen when I started babbling in tongues.  Fighting, in spite of his fierce tribal name, is a compassionate soul, and I think Matt would have been embarrassed to tell his mom he’d lost me somewhere in the Alps.  My proudest moment, when we met up with the other three apres ski, was Matt telling Greg, “I didn’t cut Dad a single break, but I gotta say, he stuck with it.”

And on Sunday, we didn’t rest.  We skied to Italy.  Seriously.  From the Matterhorn Glacier Paradise peak, you can ski an hour-and-a-half-long trail to the town of Cervinia.  Which we did under a brilliant blue sky.  (It finally stopped snowing after a day-and-a-half dump.)  And gorgeous sunshine.  And tons of fresh powder.  And a glorious, mind-blowing view of the Matterhorn from pretty much everyplace.  And a de-lish Italian lunch at Lino’s Bar & Restaurant.  True, we were almost forced to make an unplanned overnight stay in Italy — and while Cervinia was super-cute, the idea of padding around some b&b in our ski boots and long johns wasn’t all that appealing.  But we made the final tram back to the Swiss side and Zermatt with maybe two minutes to spare.

Rating Zermatt as a town and a ski resort?  You know those faux ski villages (think Stratton) that pop up like mushrooms alongside domestic ski areas?  Zermatt is what they were going for when they built ’em.  Snow-drenched trees.  Twinkling lights.  Lively pubs with skis by the bushel parked outside.  Romantic restaurants, both cutesy Swiss and elegantly Euro.  Horse-drawn carriages.  Quiet streets — by virtue of the snow and the pedestrian-only traffic.  (No motor cars; just electric taxis.)  A gem, by any standards.  Surrounded by the Alps.  With the Matterhorn as backdrop.

As you might expect, given the unusual makeup of the Zermatt 6 — five Millennials and one guy who’s about Millennial x 2 — there were endless running jokes about the Beagle Man being the Beagle Man.  First off, there’s my renowned sense of direction.  On Friday night (that’s night #2 in Zermatt), we were at Papperla, which was well on its way to becoming our home bar.  (Rough translation of “Papperla”: yada-yada-yada).   We had already worked our way to a first-name relationship with Emma, Johanna, and Greta, the three gorgeous bartenders. (Okay, Greta’s a made-up name; we never actually got her real one.)  But I wanted to leave earlier than the Young Dudes, so as not to repeat the rookie mistake of over-indulging I’d make the night before.  Now even though Papperla is on the same street as the Jagerhof, maybe 400 yards away, Greg, who knows me too well, asked, “You sure you know how to get back?”  “Of course,” I said.

The problem is that while Papperla may be only 400 yards from the Jagerhof, it’s also on a corner.  Of a four-way intersection.  Which means four choices.  Three of which are gonna be wrong.  I know this, because I tried ’em all.  Got it right on the fourth try.  Astoundingly, though the Young Dudes stayed out almost an hour later than I did, we arrived at the hotel at just about the same time.  And as usual, Derr and Geiger had to scale the wall up to our balcony, because some damn early-to-bed party-pooper had locked the front door before we got there.  (Truth be told, the Zermatt 6 kept substantially later hours than our compatriots in the Stella Alpina unit of the Jagerhof.)

And then there’s my fear of insert-your-card turnstiles.  The reason I’m afraid they won’t work for me when they work for everyone else is that they always don’t work for me when they work for everyone else.  The ticket attendant explained that the Zermatt lift ticket is not the kind you clip to your parka; it’s the kind you zip into your pocket and the scanner reads it through the fabric.  Yeah, right.  As if that was gonna work for me.  On top of which, there are turnstiles everywhere:  Getting on the gondola.  Getting off the gondola.  Getting on the chairlift.  Getting off the chairlift.  So many ways to go wrong (insert card wrong way, move too slow, move too fast), so many people watching.  Of course my first try was a fail.  But eventually I got the knack.  Positive energy.  I think I can, I think I can.  Before long, I was crushing those turnstiles.

Also . . .

•  “My Venmo’s still down”:  Are you aware that Millennials don’t pay each other back with actual money?  One pays the dinner bill with a credit card, the rest settle up by transferring funds online via Venmo.  (Carol noticed on one of Robby’s recent statements that he’d used Venmo to reimburse his roommate John 58¢.)  So the Young Dudes used their Venmo, and the Old Dude used USD.

•  Insta madness:  Though my Venmo might be down, the one post-cotton-gin technology I’ve embraced big-time is Instagram.  Can’t say exactly why, but I’m an addict.  Since all of us were pretty much constantly in each other’s company, it was hard to post without the rest of the gang  competing within seconds.  I thought I had outfoxed everyone when we went for our money shot of the Zermatt 6 in front of the Matterhorn (see photo, top):  I nabbed a foreigner to take the photo with my iPhone only.  Then I posted it before forwarding the photo to the rest of the gang.  Over dinner, I gleefully boasted I already had 11 likes.  By bedtime the same night, each of the rest of the Zermatt 6 had at least 150.

I think it was at this point that Matt sympathetically suggested I might consider bringing along one other “senior” on next year’s trip.

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