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Host: Vallee de Joux, natural ice rinkTarget not accessible

Marmi’s skates are hanging on a hook in his burrow. It’s bitterly cold outside. Now he wants to enjoy pirouetting on nature’s ice rinks.

From the hillside, Marmi sees a huge area that’s as smooth as glass. The water has turned into ice. A natural ice rink. In Switzerland, small mountain lakes, flat stretches and even hiking trails regularly turn into sheets of ice. The marmot has this more or less in its DNA. Because it has made the Alps its home since the Ice Age. And to this day, it still prefers its cool burrow to the summer sun.

In the old days, hunters probably used bones to skate over the ice. In the Netherlands 800 years ago, messengers with iron skids on wooden clogs are said to have sped across the frozen canals to deliver urgent messages. This then led to the development of boots with blades – and a popular sport, with the first skating clubs appearing in the middle of the 18th century in the United Kingdom. The poet Goethe is thought to have been one of the first ice skaters in Germany.

Marmi wonders: why do the blades actually skid in the first place? It’s very simple. As a result of the friction during movement, a thin layer of water forms between the blades and the ice, reducing the sliding friction between blades. The movement is created by pushing off with one leg and sliding with the other. This is also known as the “skating step”.

Marmi has decided to go for typical hockey shoes, which are designed to ensure that you can slide nimbly and quickly on the ice. For children and marmots, only stiffer children’s skates should be chosen. This offers protection against injury, as the muscles are not yet so well developed.

Marmi skates happily across the ice. And now for the Denise Marmot pirouette. He twirls rapidly around his own axis on one foot while gripping his hands behind his head and pulling his leg upwards on the blades. Ouch! Marmi falls. Luckily, no harm done. Pretty strenuous though, pirouetting like that.