Skiing Latvia
COUNTING SKI RESORTS
Latvia, like Estonia, has a number of ski resorts to choose from, but again, in countries like these, where the possibilities are already limited, we decided to practice our winter sports in the best they have to offer. In the case of Latvia, that is Sigulda. In fact, there are three ski hills, separately owned an operated, within a few kilometers of each other.
Kalle and I began on the largest and most developed of the three, which is also the first ski hill one gets to on the road. Whereas Estonia’s Otepää had more lifts and more variety, this hill had better grooming and somewhat more vertical. I did not measure it, but I suppose the difference in vertical was negligible. Perhaps Otepää’s top to bottom measured 48 vertical meters and Sigulda’s was 65. The length of the run might have given us an additional 1.7 seconds of skiing before we remounted the T-bar or perhaps it was 2.3 seconds. This was truly a difference that only a trivia freak could appreciate.
While anyone who comes all the way to Latvia to ski in his 56th country cannot deny being into irrelevant minutia, I must admit that my trivial mind was more interested in continuing to the next two separate ski hills so as to ski in my 465th and 466th ski resort, and I therefore left the vertical-meter count to some other nerd.
The complete story is in the coffee table book Skiing Around the World Volume II by Jimmy Petterson.