“And in Dubai this afternoon, it’s 47 degrees and 29 per cent humidity,” the radio burbled as I hurtled along Emirates Road at the statuatory 140kmh.
I looked onto the back seat to my skis. (As the last entry would suggest, taking your eyes off the road is standard driving style in the UAE) Behind them in the duffle bag in the boot were my ski boots, salopettes, beanie and other cold-weather accoutrements that had mostly been gathering dust since I arrived in Abu Dhabi.
How else to celebrate midsummer’s day in one of the hottest regions on earth, I figured, than going skiing?
I already knew it was going to be hot. A tin of club soda beside me in the car said all that was needed about temperatures at this time of year. With the heat amplified by the greenhouse effect of the car windows, the tin had distorted through thermal expansion so that the normally concave base was now a bizarre convex shape.
Despite the fast-approaching first anniversary of arriving in Abu Dhabi, I’d not yet been to Ski Dubai, the anachronistic indoor skifield in the Mall of the Emirates which personified the “because we can” era of Dubai’s development.
I’d thought skiing would be a good way to mark what would otherwise be Hike N*ked Day, which was clearly not going to be a good idea here. And when I learned that June 21 was going to coincide with returning from a reporting job in the east coast town of Khor Fakkan, it seemed like all the stars were falling into alignment.
I’d never skied an indoor field so didn’t know what to expect. It turned out, as the photo beside these words suggests, to be just like skiing outdoors!
OK, so not really, as the photo below shows when zoomed back to a wider and truer aspect. But it had a definite novelty value and was actually better than I’d been expecting.
Ski Dubai trumps itself — as if building a skifield in a country where temps regularly breach 50degC/122degF in summer was not sufficiently noteworthy on its own — as featuring a black-diamond run as part of a dog-legged slope above all the usual low-intensity attractions like snow tubing, beginners’ runs and the chance to stand in the snow.
I’d heard all the horror stories of neophyte skiers going to the top of the black diamond run and being too scared to do anything other than wait to be rescued by the long-suffering ski patrol. And it looked sufficiently steep that I did a couple of runs on the beginners’ slope for my first Telemark turns in just over a year. But on my second run down the beginners slope, the smiling liftie there said: “Go, go to the chairlift!”
It was a little steep but was fine. It was certainly nothing like Mt Shut’s towers or south face runs, let alone *real* double-black diamond runs like The Remarks’ Anzac chutes.
It was like an intermediate run at Hutt, and a short one at that, which meant the law of diminishing returns was kicking in by the time I was on the second run. It was interesting how quickly my skiing skills came back after a year in the desert.
The black slope is on the inside edge of the corner shown here. The snow was crisp and dry and with only one unpleasantly icy patch at the point towards the bottom of the black run where skiers stopped carving turns and instead build up speed for the final return to the bottom of the chair. Ice is never pretty with telemark skis but it was easily avoided by adopting the no-turn tactic.
So many things were different. Obviously there was no wind chill, so I happily skied in a fleece and thin gloves without a problem, especially when compared to the bitter Antarctic blasts that can be a feature of Mt Hutt. With no natural light, there was no need for sunglasses either.
Initially, there was not too much danger of hitting someone but the crowds picked up a bit with the after dinner crowd, and featured an impressive mix of nationalities and motivations, with the crowd being not nearly as white as might have been imagined. There were disappointingly few people clad in discordant dishdashas and burqas and none of them were skiing.
The chairlift provided the chance to chat to the other skiers about why they were there. One guy was a video editor who originally came from Kashmir and we talked about skiing at Gulmarg in the mountains above Srinagar, although I suspect he would have been a toddler or possibly not yet born when I spent a month there in early 1990.
I even had the all-too-familiar experience of having my skis — Karhu Catamount super-lightweight Telemark skis — dissed, just as my friends back home love to do.
I’d bought these in 2000 for my winter ascent of Mount Kosciuszko from the southern tip of the Australian mainland at Wilsons Promontory via the Australian Alps Walking Track. The Catamounts were a compromise between weight and capability, weighing in at under 3kg for the pair, less than half the weight of most skis. This trait proved helpful when at times I had to carry them on my pack for up to 12 days between patches of snow on the six-week ascent.
I was chatting to a young Emirati on one chairlift ride and after a while he looked down at my battered and unfashionably straight-sided skis, frowned briefly and said: “You know, there’s a ski shop here in Dubai where you can get new skis…”
It had been one year and 19 days since I’d last donned these skis, which had been part of an epic 14-hour descent from the high camp at 5200m on Denali to reach base camp 2800m lower down before the arrival of forecast bad weather.
By comparison, the Ski Dubai ski pass lasts two hours but I doubt if a single run ever took more than about 60 seconds. After about half an hour I was starting to get bored and after 90 minutes I was done. It was time to head back out into the mall. On the way in from the car, the mall ’s aircon seemed ridiculous chilly but which now felt like a sauna after 90 minutes in sub-zero temperatures on the skifield.
Then I carried my skis back through the mall, out into 40deg-plus temps in the car park and began the drive back to the Dhabs.
