TOP TO BOTTOM, LEFT TO RIGHT The terrain at Ovit Mountain offers everything from big and technical lines to gentle 30-de-gree slopes. Scattered in between, you can find a wide variety of natural features. Giray nails a flat spin 360 Japan grab on a long gully run. Giray skiing under the last rays of the day. Early and late light made for many moments of gratitude amid the natural beauty of the country’s northeast. Sunset at the Ovit 2640 Hotel after a great day of skiing the Kaçkar Mountains. The hotel served as a fitting retreat, with staff treating us like family and serving up traditional Turkish food and hospitality. A WEEK AFTER OVIT , Arya walked off the ski hill with a smile on her face. It was my niece’s first day skiing and one of the only times the 4-year-old had been on snow. Replete with a few minor breakdowns, we were attempt-ing a different challenge, this time of the toddler variety. Kartalkaya was four and a half hours from Arya’s Istanbul home, but remained a new language for the newest Dadali. Her father Engin had lived with us in the U.S. growing up, and even after returning to Türkiye to start his family, felt like a brother more than a cousin. When he heard we were coming to Türkiye, he jumped at the chance to go ski-ing together. I knew he’d spent a few days here and there, but even though I’d visited a handful of times, we’d never actually skied together. Watching him on the slopes, even a decade since his last turns, brought a certain gravity to the moment. The skiing wasn’t epic, but the impact settled somewhere in my chest. We lapped run after run, my red 062 The Ski Journal jacket serving as a beacon through a dense and settling fog. He needed this. I think I did too. Even after my family’s departure, the young mountain com-munity Ercan had alluded to high on Ovit unveiled itself on the flanks of Kartalkaya. There wasn’t a pair of twin tip skis in sight, but a snowboard competition was in full swing. An airbag jump had been set up and suddenly I was sessioning a lip with Turkish kitesurf instructors. Snow formed a common bond here just as it did back in North America, a comforting familiarity. For so many years, I had felt mentally tormented by the pressures of Turkish society at home, that skiing had uprooted me from family and made me different from other Turks. But what if skiing could actually bring me closer to my community, to being Dadali, than ever before? As we prepared to head back to the city, a text from Engin came through. It was Arya. She couldn’t stop talking about the next time they would ski.
The Ski Journal Volume 17, Issue 4: Page 62
