Alpine Winter Sports – Page 50 – Everything you need to know about skiing and other Alpine winter sports

02/08/201409/02/2019

Learn the Lingo – Common Foreign Language Expressions

Although English is widely spoken in most major ski resorts, often the more rustic restaurants, family-run hire shops and even front-of-office ski school staff do not speak it. And isn’t it appropriate to at least make an attempt to speak in the language of your hosts? And what if you want to fraternise with the locals?

Summer is a good time to decide both your target winter sports destination and also to brush up on the local lingo in good time. If you want to learn a language, I’m a great fan of the Michel Thomas system. You can do it in the car or on the train, in fact just about anywhere you can listen to it and without the need to read a book or follow the text in a book.

For those who don’t want to learn the language, but could do with some useful phrases, I will provide some in French, German and Italian in the next few weeks.

04/07/201404/07/2014

Lifts in Switzerland

A few of my friends are doing a spot of summer skiing in Tignes and putting up annoying pictures of them enjoying themselves on Facebook. However I am not one for summer skiing – it just doesn’t seem right! And the nearest winter slopes are a long way away.

However that isn’t to say I am not thinking of where I will be skiing this Winter. My wife has already booked somewhere near Pizol, and I am getting a dribble of press releases ahead of the new season.

One of the more interesting press releases was from Seilbahnen Schweiz aka Remontées Mécaniques Suisses aka Funivie Svizzere aka Funiculars Svizras aka Swiss Cable Cars Association. They have put together an interactive site here where you can zoom in on the cable cars in Switzerland and click a link to take you to the home page of the respective operator.

05/06/2014

150 Years of Winter Tourism

In the autumn of 1864, reputedly, Johannes Badrutt wagered some English summer guests the cost of their stay at the Hotel Kulm in St Moritz if they did not enjoy wintering there as much as they had enjoyed staying there over the summer. They arrived in time for Christmas and stayed through until Easter. In contrast to the gloomy, short, damp days of an English winter cooped up indoors, they were able to sit outside in the almost endless sunshine. Badrutt had won his bet, and with that the winter tourism industry was born.

That famous wager was made 150 years ago, and St Moritz will be celebrating it in style.

Winter tourism now vies with summer tourism in the Alps for the numbers of visitors and overnight stays. Badrutt and his son, Casper, went on to be responsible for a series of innovations, including coining the term Palace to describe a grand hotel and creating the world’s first bobsleigh course. And, of course, Badrutt’s Palace to this day remains one of the most iconic hotels in the world, and St Moritz the epitome of winter holiday resorts.

04/05/201404/05/2014

Spring Skiing in Zermatt

Some of the most joyous events in the ski season happen in Zermatt in late April. All the ski instructors, laid off for the season elsewhere, descend on Zermatt for a last hurrah. Unfettered by snowploughing novices, snivelling kids, off-piste wannabees that need to get picked up out of the deep stuff and all those other frustrations, they show the same joie de vivre as the cattle being released from their winter quarters onto the meadows. It is a great festival of impromptu events – slaloms, jumps, skicross and slopestyle, followed by shots and beers in Zermatt itself (Sadly Hennu Stall is now closed). This week also saw 4,500 hardy souls embark on Patrouille des Glaciers, the ski-mountaineering race that starts in Zermatt and ends in Verbier, running high above all the mountain villages along the route.

In fact, Zermatt is the resort that keeps on giving with the official end of the winter season, and the start of the summer season, in June. As the cams on this page demonstrate, even this late in the season there are still good snow conditions.

The freezing level recently has been low enough to mean that fresh snow has settled briefly in the village. None of the valley runs are open and, although the snow above Sunnegga and Riffelberg looks good, only the Kleine Matterhorn slopes are open, above Steg – but today that is still 104km to enjoy. With temperatures set to rise in the days ahead and sunnier weather forecast, the conditions will gradually deteriorate but – if you get up early enough and are prepared for a long ride up and back down, the snow before late afternoon is still worth going after.

Unfortunately Zermatt do not lower their prices for this more modest offering, so be prepared for an eye-popping CHf 86/- ticket price for a day, but the uncrowded slopes just about make up for it, especially on one of those days when the sun is so warm that you can ski in a T-shirt. A word of warning, though, the sun is fierce enough to burn you to blisters in only one day, and once the sun slips behind a cloud or a mountain, the air can be bitterly cold so do make sure you are adequately prepared.