The front skiers break a trail in the new snow, and the rest glide smoothly behind. Fall off your skis and you are swimming in powder. Stand up without them and you flounder in waist-high drifts. Lungs pounding out torrents of frozen breath, we speed down narrow forest corridors, then burst into dazzling clearings. Thick layers of snow blanket every horizontal surface.
Trees slumber under their voluptuous covers.
Twelve o'clock, and a wooden sign tells us we've come halfway. It's time for the Russian winter sportsman's brew-up. Soon a healthy blaze is going, and great, battered boiling cans emerge from rucksacks. There are hunks of black sourdough bread, pickled cucumbers, salted fish, steaming potato soup and weighty slabs of smoked pork fat that melt deliciously in the mouth. Inevitably, flasks of vodka appear.