As I strain my eyes a little, I can barely make out the outline of the cable car station about 200 meters away through the thick snowstorm. I am at 3,900 metres on the mountain. The weather set in quickly and it is the end of the ski day at Saas-Fee in Switzerland. Precisely the time when most accidents in the mountains happen. The last cable car to the bottom of the mountain is in 10 minutes. I trudge back up through the snow to the casualty. Through the thick grey, I see a small, crumpled figure being covered every second by the relentless heavy downfall. The child’s leg is broken. He is slipping into shock, growing pale, cold, and unconscious.
My mind is fogged for a moment as I think back on the unsettling comment from a skier that morning as I was getting out of the cable car. “I love this colour,” he said, while touching my cheek. “You’re the only one of you out here”.
I probably was. The whole year I’d been living and working in the French and Swiss Alps I’d seen one other black person out ski mountaineering. It was a hilarious moment in itself: me trudging uphill and him whizzing downhill, both of us waving frantically at each other, clearly ecstatic to see one another. This moment in the cable car, when I was petted like an exotic beast, felt patronising and threw me off kilter, stealing my confidence.
In the last few years, I rediscovered the majesty of the outdoors. Ironically, it was when I was living in a big city when I began climbing. In the inner city bouldering gyms, I developed a taste for bigger adventures and, spending every penny I earnt from my wage as an emergency nurse, began travelling to the Alps and finding new opportunities.
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