Ski resorts offer respite from the battleground
POLYANYTSYA, UKRAINE >> Children in puffy snowsuits waited patiently to board the ski lift, clutching their poles. Some families rode to the top just to breathe in the crisp mountain air and walk between the tall pines that framed the valley below.
Ski instructors in red onesies guided students down bunny slopes coated with snow churned out by machines, as the real stuff has been in short supply throughout Europe this winter. Teenagers let out delighted yelps as they slipped on the ice of a nearby skating rink.
It was almost easy to forget that this idyllic scene — at the Bukovel ski resort in the Carpathian Mountains in western Ukraine — was unfolding in a country at war, with pitched fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces playing out on front lines a few hundred miles away.
Some of the Ukrainians on the crowded slopes were trying to escape the stresses of life under siege. Some were simply trying to find a place to work with somewhat reliable electricity.
“It's a way to get normal life back,” almost an act of defiance, said Yana Chernetska, 30, who came to the mountain from Odesa for a few days with her 4-year-old daughter and her husband. “No missiles should stifle a normal childhood for my child.”
But for others, the battlefield was never far from their minds.
Taras Bihus — mentally and physically battered from his months as a soldier in the east — was hoping to rest and recuperate at the resort.
Before the war, he said, the mountains were like home for him. He spent winters learning to snowboard here, eventually competing professionally. Then he became a snowboarding instructor at Bukovel, in the village of Polyanytsya. But when the war began, he volunteered for the military.
After a few months of training, he was sent to the county's southeastern front. He struggled to describe what he saw.
“You may seem ready,” he said, “but you see a very different reality when you get there.”
He was discharged from active duty this past fall when an old snowboarding injury flared up and left him barely able to walk. After some physical therapy, he returned here in December to resume work as an instructor.
“It's everything a person needs to stay sane,” Bihus, 29, said of working at the resort. “Here, it's like paradise. When you go up the mountain, you see the clouds rolled out right in front of you.”
While Bukovel is the flashiest of Ukraine's ski resorts, the more rustic alternative is the nearby ski resort of Dragobrat. It is accessible only by an unpaved road whose successive hairpin turns climb steeply toward the mountaintop, but with the snow at last falling heavily at the start of January, families were flocking to its slopes.
Artem Mitin, 35, who owns a ski shop on the mountain, said the clientele had changed. Eastern Europeans were not coming. Neither were large groups. And there were many newcomers.
“It's not just about skiing,” he said, adding, “I think they come here to forget.”