Editor’s note: David Scott, a 2008 Durango High School graduate, is teaching English in China’s far western province of Xinjiang (New Frontier) in the city of Korla. He will be writing about his experiences once a month.
As far as ski resorts go, Long Zhi Shan, or Dragon Mountain, is not your typical one: there are no chairlifts; the ski instructors wear jeans; there are only two runs; and it’s in a Chinese desert. Nevertheless, the idea of skiing here is very real, and for the people of Korla, this is their resort and they are proud of it.
The city of Korla is situated to the north of the Taklamakan Desert, China’s biggest desert. In the winter, the temperatures can get as cold as minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit. However, because it lies in the rain shadow of the Himalayas, Korla receives very little precipitation, making snow quite rare. So when my friends invited me to go skiing, I was quite surprised. But like many Durangoans, I’m always excited to try out a new mountain, and I figured in China it would be an entirely different experience.
On the drive to the resort, all I could see was dirt. There was barely any vegetation, let alone snow. Even the road turned into dirt as we went. I thought instead of snow maybe they used dirt. But after just 10 minutes, we turned a corner, and I saw the resort for the first time.
All around was desert and sand, except for a single hill as big as two football fields that was covered in more than enough snow to go skiing. As we parked, I wondered where exactly the snow had come from. I didn’t see any snowmaking machinery and didn’t think that it could have snowed that much in just this small of an area leaving everything else around it dry.
My most plausible idea was that the resort actually transported the snow from the northern mountains where it does snow quite a lot. As funny as that sounds, it’s exactly something that could happen in China.
Once we paid for our tickets and rented our skis, we hit the slopes. Instead of a chairlift, they had a long escalator-like conveyor belt where people would stand and be transported to the top.
The area’s two runs were not very steep and took less than two minutes to get down, but the Chinese skiers loved it. This was their ski resort. Everyone from the young to old tried their luck going down the mountain, while jeans-wearing ski instructors tried their best to teach them the basics.
Many times after skiers would fall, another person would run into them and they would both slide down the hill, laughing. It didn’t seem to matter if they were skiing or on the ground, they were enjoying every minute of it.
I never thought I would spend a day skiing in a desert. Long Zhi Shan hardly resembles Colorado ski areas, but I enjoyed my time there. And like the people of Korla, I am proud of my new-found resort.
David Scott can be reached at darysc24@gmail.com.
