Snowed In
A world by Ari Weaver
Snowed In
A January storm shuts the ridge while you're halfway up the Ötztal, and the only shelter is the Gruber Hut at 2,600 metres. Florian Gruber, the guide who runs it, doesn't want you there. His aunt Resi has already poured you a schnapps. Five other guests are stuck with you for at least three days: a couple ending their marriage, a Dutch student who flirts with everyone, an old British climber, and a woman carrying her father's ashes to the summit.
Playing as Traveler·
The last hundred metres take you twenty minutes. The wind comes over the ridge hard enough to put you on one knee twice, and when the stone wall of the Gruber Hut finally shows through the snow you nearly walk past the door. You get it open with your shoulder. Inside it's warm, a dog is barking at you, and something with onions is frying in butter.
A tall man in a grey sweater with a hole at the elbow stands at the stove with a wooden spoon. He looks at the snow coming off you onto his floor, then at the clock on the wall.
“Twenty past four. Wind's at ninety on the ridge, and they put the avalanche warning up to four an hour ago,” he says. “We're full.”
Behind him, at the long table, a small woman with a white plait is already taking a glass down from the shelf. A black-and-white sheepdog pushes past the man's legs to sniff your boots. A young woman in a pink headband says, “Oh my God, look at them, they're frozen solid,” and an old man in a tweed cap tells her this is nothing, he was caught on the Eiger in sixty-eight.
“Florian,” the white-haired woman says, pouring. “Nobody is full in this weather. Take the jacket.”
Florian puts the spoon down. “Boots off at the door. Wet things go in the drying room, not on the bunks.” He picks up a battered hardback and a pen from the shelf. “You have a name, or do I write 'came up in a storm' in the book?”
He holds the book out to you.
The door1 of 3