To descend an ice-run like the Cresta at St. Moritz is no doubt a most thrilling and skilled adventure, but the vast majority of people who say (with perfect truth) that they enjoy tobogganing would sooner think of ascending in an aeroplane than descending the Cresta, and would freeze with fright at the thought of embarking on it. On the other hand, the skilled Cresta runner would no more think that the quiet descent of snow-covered roads on a Swiss luge was tobogganing in his sense of the word, than the aeroplanist would allow that a man practising high jump was flying. From which we may rightly infer that there are various sorts of movement which are covered by the word tobogganing.

As a matter of fact there are, commonly practised in Switzerland, three broad and widely differing species of tobogganing. They are as follows:

The number of folk who practise the first of these immensely outnumbers those who practise the other two; for everybody in Switzerland in the winter is guilty of the first practice, from the small Swiss native, aged perhaps eight or under, who marches up to school with its books tied on to its luge, and gaily and jauntily returns home seated on it, steering and guiding with its ridiculous little feet, and shouting “Gare” or “Achtung,” according to the canton, up to the skilled racer on the skeleton who carries off the Symonds bowl in the race on the Klosters road at Davos. But all these, different as their performances are, are going on snow-runs. The snow may in places, it is true, where it has thawed and frozen again, intimately resemble ice. But the ice-run is different in kind from any snow-runs.

For ordinary travel, let us say from your hotel down to the rink, where there is no question of racing, but just getting there, the toboggan generally used is the Swiss toboggan or luge. It is a high wooden frame (high, that is, compared to the skeleton) with two runners shod with steel or iron, and you sit on it exactly as is most comfortable—it is never very comfortable—and tie your lunch and skates on to it, and push off. If you want to turn to the right, you put your right heel into the snow, or dab with your hand on the right side; if you want to go to the left, you perform the same operation in a sinister manner. If you want to stop, you put both heels into the snow. If you want to go quicker, you, while still sitting down, walk with both feet simultaneously. This sounds complicated; but it is quite clear the moment you feel you want to go quicker—it is done instinctively. Finally, if you are going fast, and must make a sudden stop,

owing to some obstacle in the shape of an old lady or a sleigh immediately in front of you, you turn into any convenient snowbank at the side of the road, and having picked yourself up, look injured, which physically you are not. Or, if there is no convenient snowbank, you fall off to one side or the other, and often observe your malicious luge proceeding calmly on its course without you. In fact, you do anything that occurs to you at the moment, except upset the old lady or charge the sleigh.

The foregoing is a complete compendium of all that it is necessary to know or do, when tobogganing on an ordinary road. It is as simple as walking and generally quicker. The same, in the main, applies to the use of luges on an artificially-made run. But every artificial run implies the idea of racing, and thus the object is to get down it as quickly as possible. But every artificial run has turns in it, and the idea is to get round these turns without capsize and with as little loss of speed as possible. The outside of these turns is therefore banked up (i.e. if the turn is to the right, the left side of the track is banked up, and vice versa), so that you do not (if you manage properly) run out of the track, but climb the bank and descend again into the track. But if you do not manage properly, one of three things will happen to you.

(i) You go over the bank and are heavily spilled. This is fatal if you want to win a race, unless everybody else does the same.

(ii) You upset on the bank. This is not necessarily so fatal, unless you entirely part company with your toboggan, which then finishes triumphantly without you.

(iii) In excess of caution, you diminish your speed so much before you get to the bank that you merely crawl round the bend. This is moderately fatal.

But we need not waste more time over artificial snow-runs. They are only a compendious form of road-running, and what is necessary in the way of steering and judgment of pace on them, is equally true with regard to such fine natural runs as the Klosters road. Here there are no artificial banks to keep the runner in his course. He has to get around the corners by judicious steering, and crawling when necessary, and, above all, by adjustment of weight. On the ordinary luge or Swiss toboggan there is little adjustment of weight that can be made, but it is a very different affair when you negotiate the same road on racing toboggans, namely skeletons, which are also used on ice-runs.

Here, instead of this little high wooden platform on which you sit, there is a very low framework supported on round steel runners, blunt nosed in front, and instead of sitting on it you lie on it, face downwards. The runners, sharply bent upwards in front, return and form the support of the low frame, and you grasp these with your hands, and lie down with arms bent or extended as required. But the cushion on which you recline moves backwards and forwards in the manner of a sliding seat, so that you can lie with legs right out behind the base of the machine, and can use great part of your weight, inclining it to one side or the other of the toboggan, in order to get it round curves. Similarly, the hands have an immense leverage behind them, and with one foot lying out behind and raking the snow, a curve can be made at high speed, which it would be impossible to get round on a Swiss toboggan without heavy braking and great loss of velocity. When riding a skeleton, the toes of the boots are fitted with toothed irons, so that they can be used together as brakes, or singly, in order to make the toboggan curve in the required direction. The runners of these toboggans are not rectangular like those on luges, but of circular shape, thus producing the minimum of friction on their travelling surface. Even on snow-tracks these are capable of tremendous speed, though that speed does not approach what they compass on frozen ice-runs, where they travel almost frictionless.

Apart from the “storm and stress” of racing, there is a wonderful pleasure, if the track is smooth and trafficless, in this swift gliding over frozen snow, and one of the most romantic of experiences in all the gamut of motion is tobogganing by moonlight. Never will the writer forget one such night on the Klosters road. We had sleighed up from Davos, a party of friends, to Wolfgang, on one of those magical nights when no breath of wind stirred the lightest jewels of hoar-frost on the pines, when the moon was full, and the stars burned like diamonds aflame. All the way up, after dinner, there had been talk and laughter, and standing ready to go, we arranged that there should be two minutes’ pause between the despatch of the toboggans, and one by one we slid off into the unspeakable silence of the Alpine night. It so happened that I was the last to go, and for two minutes I waited at the head of the track in a stillness that is unimaginable. When I started there was in all probability not a living soul within half a mile, and the nearest was sliding swiftly further away every moment. For a little way the track lay open to the full blaze of the zenithed moon, but soon it plunged beneath the impenetrable canopy of pines. It was possible to see the white glimmer of the road ahead, otherwise there was nothing visible. Then, with the suddenness of a curtain withdrawn, the blackness became a celestial and ineffable glory of close burning constellations, with the full disc of the moon shining imperially among them. Far below, distant and dim, I could see the lights of Klosters, and half-longed to reach them, in order to get out of this awful and burning and frozen solitude, half-longed that my travel might be lengthened into an eternity of wheeling stars and flying road. Sometimes it seemed that I was rushing headlong through space, sometimes it seemed that I was stopping absolutely still, and that it was this unreal world of trees and road and bridges and banks that hurled itself by me, and that the stars and I were the steadfast things. Once the sudden roar of a stream over the bridge of which I passed sounded loud and menacing, but in a moment that was past, and the hissing spray of frozen snow coming from the bows of my toboggan was the only sound audible. And then the lights of Klosters gleamed larger and nearer, and this wonderful swift solitude was over.

(As a matter of fact, I had an awful spill by the cabbage garden corner: but though that was very vivid at the time, there remains nothing of it, except the fact, in my memory. It would have been more romantic, but less realistic, not to have mentioned it.)

Ice-runs

There is one Mecca: there is one St. Peter’s: there is one Cresta. As is Mecca to the Mohammedan, as is St. Peter’s to the Catholic, so is the Cresta run at St. Moritz to the tobogganer. It is the ice-run. There may be others, and there certainly are, but what does the Cresta care? It has a cachet which no other possesses.

The Cresta was first engineered, I believe, in the year 1884, and its chief architect was Herr Peter Badruth of St. Moritz. From that time onwards it has yearly been built up with as much thought and care as is lavished on a cathedral; every yard of it is staked out, and the angles, curves, and shaping of its banks and corners most accurately calculated. It is built up from the bottom upwards, so that the lower part of it can be used while the construction of the upper part is still going on, and the whole run is generally open not until after the middle of February. Every winter is this amazing architecture in crystal planned and carried out under the direction of Mr. W. H. Bulpett, who has for many years been chief architect.

To begin with, the snow is trampled down, after the manner of making the foundation of an ice-rink, so as to form a firm solid base, and where the banks are to be built snow is brought in sleigh-loads, shovelled on to it, and beaten down. More snow will then be still required, and again more, till the whole of the banks are solid and of the necessary height and curve. Then the banks and the rest of the course (the straights) are sprinkled with water and again beaten down, and the glazed ice surface begins to be made. When this has frozen, water is again sprinkled on it, and again and yet again, till the whole section has become, banks and course alike, a surface of smooth hard ice. Down each side of the narrow racing track (except at its banked corner it is only a few feet wide, a riband of ice) are little walls of firm built snow, also iced, so that the runner, if he is going moderately straight, cannot leave the track, though he often comes into slight collision with these walls. But even slight collisions when travelling at a speed that sometimes exceeds 70 miles an hour are not experiences to be encountered unarmed, and the elbows and knees are thickly protected by felt pads, while on the toes of his boots are toothed rakes made of steel, which are used to guide the runner round the bank and to check his speed if it is so excessive that, unchecked, he would run over the tops of the banks.

A very high degree of nerve, skill, and judgment is required on such an ice-run as this. The rider’s object being to cover the course in as few seconds as possible, he must clearly take his banks (i.e. get round the curves) with as little loss of speed as possible, and he will only use his brakes when his judgment tells him that if unchecked he would be carried over the top of them. On the other hand, he does not want to brake unless it be necessary, and you will often see him with his top runners within an inch or two of the edge of these huge sloping ice-curves. At Battledore and Shuttlecock, the two biggest banks on the Cresta, he enters the second immediately after coming out of the first, and the two form a great S curve. Lower down again, before he threads the

arch of the railway bridge, there is another called Bulpett’s corner, designed to protect him from running out to the left of the course, and then a headlong descent takes him to the winning-post, which is at the bottom of the hill. Passing this he snaps a thread with an electric connection, which registers the exact fraction of a second at which he passes it. Then, on his run out, he whirls up a steep ice-covered slope, for if this were not iced too, his speed would be so abruptly checked that he and his toboggan would be bowled over and over like a shot rabbit, and comes to a stop just outside the little village of Cresta. But even with this steep slope to check him after his race is over, the momentum acquired is so great that, if he does not brake heavily all the way up this hill, he will, on reaching the level ground at the top, shoot high into the air, toboggan and all.

Some idea of the speed at which toboggans travel on the straight reaches of the course may be gathered from the average speed at which the course can be run. It is over 1300 yards in length, and has been traversed in a shade over 60 seconds! This means that the highest rate of speed must be well over 70 miles an hour. This on a pair of steel runners, head foremost, with your face a few inches above the solid ice, with nothing to check you except a small-toothed rake on the toe of each boot! Yet so wonderfully skilful is the construction of the run, so cunningly is it built to safeguard the headlong traveller, that accidents are very few. Two fatal ones, indeed, there have been, but of these one had nothing to do with the course itself, but was owing to the fact that a rider started from the top before one of the barriers across the course, which show that it is not open for racing, had been removed. In the other, the rider ran over a bank and his toboggan fell on the top of him. One of the great difficulties which the builders and managers of this run, in company with other ice-runs, have to contend against, is the power of the sun. It is, of course, absolutely necessary that the icing of the run should be so solid that there is no chance of the runner of a toboggan going through it, which would naturally mean a bad spill. But it is also necessary that certain of the banks must have the sun blazing into them all day long, which would cause them to lose ice faster than it could be made by the sprinkling which goes on when the sun is off them. At such points, therefore, big canvas screens are put up, which shade the bank from the direct rays; also tobogganing is never permitted to go on all day. It starts early in the morning, when the run has been recuperated by the night of frost, and is closed when, in the opinion of the management, the sun has so softened the banks that there is danger of a toboggan cutting through the crust.

Bobsleighing (or Bobbing)

This charming form of the sport may be described as combined tobogganing, and in bobbing races teams of four enter against each other. The form of toboggan used is, of course, immensely larger than that employed in single tobogganing, since it will hold five or six persons, and its construction is altogether different and most elaborate. It consists of a long, low platform some 10 feet in length, and is mounted, not on one pair of runners, but on two. The pair that supports the fore part of the bobsleigh is a sort of bogie-truck, pivoted under the platform, and it can be turned to the right and left in order to direct the course of the bob round curves. This turning of it is done by the captain, who sits first at the bows of the sleigh, and is worked by ropes, which he holds in his hands, or by a wheel which controls its movements. In long runs, as on the Schatz-alp at Davos, the wheel is far better than the ropes, since it entails so much less strain on the hands of the steersman: on a short run the ropes are as good. Behind the captain sit the members of his crew in line, with the loops of rope just outside the framework of the sleigh, in which they fix their heels. Last of them all sits the brakesman, at the stern of the sleigh, who has in his control a powerful steel-toothed brake, which crosses the sleigh behind and is worked with levers. But it is the captain who is in command of the bob, and the brakesman and other members of the crew only perform his orders. The word “bobsleigh” is derived from the movement of leaning or “bobbing” forward, which is done by all the crew together, to get up speed or increase it. They come forward quickly with a jerk, and go back again slowly and steadily, and this without doubt accelerates the movement of the sleigh.

As in all other forms of tobogganing, braking is employed to diminish speed in coming to corners, where otherwise the momentum would cause the whole concern to leave the track altogether. So also, just as the ice-tobogganer inclines his body inwards in a similar position, the captain and crew lean to the inside of the track when going round a corner so as to help the toboggan round it, while the inclination of the front pair of runners is directed to the same end. By strong leaning inwards, combined with the inclination of the bogie-pair of runners, quite considerable curves may be taken at high velocity without the use of the brake at all, and the consequent loss of speed. But all this is left to the judgment of the captain, who has to decide whether by direction of the bogie-runners alone, or by that in conjunction with the leaning inwards of his crew, he can safely negotiate a corner without calling for the use of the brake. And the responsibility is entirely in his hands. At the same time much depends on the prompt obedience of the crew to his orders, for it is easily possible that a corner might have been safely coasted round if they had obeyed his call to lean inwards, which would spill them all if his call was not immediately responded to. How great the effect of this inward shifting of the weight can be, if it is thoroughly carried out, may be guessed from Plate XXXI. In this same photograph the inward direction of the front pair of runners may also be seen assisting the work of the crew. And it is this “teamwork,” the sense of working in unison under orders, which gives much of its charm to bobbing. Everyone feels—rightly—that much of the success of the run depends on his individual work, even though his individual work is only to lean as far as possible out of the bob without parting company with it altogether.

Bobbing can be practised on an ordinary road covered with hard snow, or, in excelsis, on runs constructed for this express

TAILING

From the Drawing by Fleming Williams