Winter Sports in Switzerland 1911

Sir Henry Lunn, father of Sir Arnold Lunn, the great advocate of skiing and Switzerland, wrote a chapter for the charming “A Winter Sport Book”, illustrated by Reginald Cleaver and published in 1911. Here is some of his article, and some of the illustrations.

Winter Sports in Switzerland for Englishmen orinated with Mr. John Addington Symonds at Davos, about forty years ago. At that time, with Alpine resorts, which are now crowded with devotees of various sports, were dreary solitudes in winter, deserted even by the peasants themselves. Somewhere about 1880 Grindelwald first opened its doors to a select company of Alpine Club men, and at the same time St. Moritz began to be frequented. On Christmas Day, 1891, in what was called the Little Bear, which had been erected as a winter house, one hundred people sat down to dinner. This was supposed to be a wonderful record in Grindelwald. Rates then were low and so were numbers. One could get accommodation in those days for about seven francs a day , where now the figure would be from twenty to twenty-five francs a day. At St. Moritz, I have met people who stayed at the Kulm in those early days for five francs a day. It would be difficult to get in there now for less than twenty francs, while many people pay thirty francs and more.

The number of beds now available at Grindelwald and St. Moritz in winter are given in the Swiss winter book.

On 6th January 1892 I went with a small party of readers of the Review of the Churches to Grindelwald, as the two vessels on which we were going to Norway had been wrecked, and we had some Reunion talks, which Jed to the Reunion Conferences later, which took place in three successive years. This was the beginning of my visiting Switzerland. At that time I believe the only winter resorts open were Grindelwald, Davos, and St. Moritz, which were all in their infancy as winter resorts. A little later came the opening of Arosa, another lung resort, as a rival to Davos ; The opening of Caux in the Rhone Va11ey; a few years later Chateau d’Oeux; and meanwhile St. Moritz was going ahead by 1eaps and bounds.

The real development of Winter Sports dates however – I think I am correct in saying, from 1902, when the first party of Etonians and Harrovians went to Adelboden. I had visited that place and found that the proprietor had made an attempt to open, the previous year, with about twenty visitors. Mr. John Stogdon of Harrow wrote a letter which sent out in facsimile to old Etonians and Harrovians, saying that the Grand Hotel at Adelboden had been reserved especially for them. That winter Sir Walter Parratt, Sir Richard, Jebb, the Bishop of Wakefield, the Bishop of Hereford, and a number of other well-known people went to Adelboden. We had four hundred visitors in all, and the centre has never looked back since – although, from my standpoint, “Every prospect pleases and only man is vile,” as the hotel-keepers broke their contracts with me, and I had to give up the place.

In December 1905 the Public Schools Winter Sports Club, which had sprung into being during that year, opened four new centres – Montana, which has ever since remained the favourite of the Club; Villars-sur-Ollon, which is also a great favourite, and has a magnificent rink; Celerina, which the Club never took to for some reason; and Klosters, below Davos, which did not succeed because people thought it was too near a consumptive resort, though this was a complete delusion, as the microbes would have had a harder journey to reach Klosters from Davos than the Israelites undertook when they set out from Egypt for the Promised Land; but the idea had done a good deal to hinder the development of the place.

The Public Schools Alpine Sports Club that year numbered about four hundred and forty members; it now has just about ten times that number.

In later seasons the Public Schools Alpine Sports Club has opened the following centres: Mürren, Wengen, Beatenberg, and has joined in the development of Lenzerheide.

In 1892, when I first went to Switzerland in winter, I think I am right in saying that the total number of beds in hotels for sport, as opposed to invalid resorts, was not more than three or four hundred. The Winter Sports Year Book will give you the actual number; but I believe that in round numbers there are now about ten thousand.

One fact of interest is the way in which the other nations are gradually following the lead of Englishmen. In the early days of which I have spoken, up to the end of the century, visitors to Swiss winter resorts were almost exclusively English, with the possible exception of St. Moritz. But within the last few years, Germans have come in considerable numbers to Grindelwald, Engelberg, and Caux us well as to St. Moritz. The Public School resorts are, of course, exclusively English. This tendency on the part of the leading Continental nations has been greatly promoted by the presence of members of their Ryal families at St. Moritz. One year the Crown Prince of Germany, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, and one or two other heirs to European thrones were staying at that centre.

In matters of sport and social intercourse our nobility generally lead and the rest follow; but as regards Alpine sport the case has been reversed. The Alpine Club draws its members chiefly from the educated middle-class, and it is this class that forms the largest proportion of English visitors to Switzerland in winter, though their example, as has been seen, is being followed even by crown princes.

With reference to the question of sports, skating, of course, has been the great feature in English centres. The English style of skating was practised exclusively at Davos and Grindelwald, and almost exclusively at St. Moritz. Gradually the International or Continental style is driving out English skating from Davos and Grindelwald, and possibly from St. Moritz. The reasons for this are twofold. (1) The International style of skating takes up so little room. Two International skaters can waltz on a piece of ice of 400 square feet, whereas English skaters for a figure of four would require about 60 feet square or 3600 square feet. Hotel proprietors, of course, prefer that style of skating which takes up least ice room. (2) Continental skating is much attractive as a spectacle than the English style. I think I have told you of a remark which Elizabeth Asquith made about the two kindsof skating. Her mother said the Continental skater thought he was making an epigram and only made a conundrum. Elizabeth said, ” I think the English skater makes a platitude.” The two schools of skating regard one another almost as the Orangemen and Roman Catholics do in the north of Ireland.

Curling twenty years ago was almost a dead letter in Switzerland.One saw the stone lying idly, day by day, and occasionally a few energetic Scotsmen would send a stone down the ice ; but one might pass the winter in Switzerland without once seeing a real curling match.

In January 1905 I offered a cup for an International Curling Match at Kandersteg, and nearly a hundred Scotsmen came all the way from their native land, bringing with them about three tons of Caledonian granite in curling-stones. In some cases they took them into their sleeping-cars, they valued them so much. This gave a great fillip to the game in Switzerland, and directed the attention of the Scottish curling world to Switzerland. Every year since then the International curling match has been held at some Swiss centre, and Englishmen have taken up curling in Switzerland with an enthusiasm almost equal to that with which they have taken up golf in their own country.

Ski-ing was unknown in Switzerland till about 1895. The first person I ever saw ski-ing in Switzerland was Conan Doyle, at Davos, and he had, of course, brought the art from Norway. He was one of the earliest ski-runners. Now every postman delivers his letters on ski in the winter, and little children untwist the hoops from barrels and make themselves embryo ski. There are two English Ski Clubs and endless Swiss and German societies. The two English Clubs are (1) the Alpine Ski Club, which exists to promote mountaineering on ski, and has rather a stifftest of membership on the lines of the Alpine Club, and (2) the Ski Club of Great Britain, which admits men and women, and has no severe requirements for entrance, but welcomes on a broad basis all who are interested in skiing.

Tobogganing, since ski-ing became so popular, has rather gone out of fashion. St. Moritz, maintains at great expense one ice-run, the Cresta, of world-wide fame, down which tobogganers come at the rate of from sixty to seventy miles an hour, but the total number of those who come down the whole length of the run, which is nearly a mile long, is less than twenty during the year, and there are probably from ten thousand to twenty thousand visitors at St. Moritz during the wi11t r, o it is obvious that tobogganing only attracts few votaries. The old German schlitten, or wooden toboggans, were used by good walkers, who would go up to the top of a mountain pass, lunch there, rest an hour in the sunshine, and come down on the toboggan. But now the toboggan is forsaken for the ski, which answer the same purpose much more effectively.

St. Moritz has developed a rather expensive sport known as ski-jöring, which is practised at no other place in Switzerland, and which requires a frozen lake or river for its exercise. In this sport a ski-runner is drawn over the ice by two horses, which he drives himself, at full gallop. The sport is very exciting to watch. Race-horses are brought from Berlin and Vienna, and the expense is, of course, prohibitive except for the wealthiest sportsmen.

The bob-sleigh is really a bogie-carriage composed of two toboggans with a seat run right across the two, each toboggan being movable on its own axis, and it furnishes acommodation for four, six, or eight persons. lt is a deadly weapon of destruction, and hasa great many accidents to its credit. Th pace attained on this fearsome instrument is tremendous, but where, as at St. Moritz, there is an ice-run carefully prepared and reserved for bob-sleighing, which ss notpermitted elsewhere, the danger is confined to those taking part in the sport. In some centres the public roads are used, to the peril both or (the bob-sleighers and of the passers-by. However, no danger will deter an Englishman from practising his favourite sport, and bob-sleighing has a number of votaries in nearly all the centres.

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The Future of Skiing

The 2022/3 season has finished for all but a handful of ski areas on shrinking glaciers. it’s always a bittersweet time of the year. Spring skiing is full of icy early morning runs, sunny lunches on mountain restaurant terraces, heavy evening resort runs and al fresco après ski. And the knowledge it will be six or more months before most of us visit the slopes again.

I feel it in my aging, aching bones each season. Every year I become less adventurous, pause longer between runs and – whilst I always start early in the day – finish earlier.

This season may have been atypical in many ways. Firstly it was the first proper season post the pandemic (although in many regards it is still with us). However we also saw some prolonger periods of warm weather and little precipitation. Global warming or just a bad season? Who knows. But global warming is a feature, and it impacts winter sports more than any other sport.

Most symptomatic of changing weather patterns is the shrinkage of glaciers. The melting of the world’s glaciers has nearly doubled in speed over the past 20 years, according to an article in Nature published a couple of years ago. In many resorts the rapid shrinkage of glaciers is all to obvious to the regular skier.

Alongside this the snow line is retreating, not consistently every year, but trending that way, It is forcing some alpine plants to retreat further up mountains because of the advance of invasive valley plants, to a point where one day there will be nowhere further for them to retreat.

For skiers the shorter winter sports seasons have made some resorts less viable, has made ski holiday planning less predictable and has led to greater environmental damage through the increased use of snow cannon.

That is not to say resorts are not trying to improve their environmental footprint, some very successfully. But the ski industry is not a poster child for environmentalism.

Many younger people are starting to see skiing as a bad environmental choice. The Ski Club of Great Britain has an aging membership, in part symptomatic of the fact that younger generations are not as attracted to ski holidays as much as baby boomers were.

Additionally, skiers who invest a lot of money and vacation time in their passion may be increasingly frustrated by unpredictable conditions and choose other holiday options, or perhaps ski less frequently.

It will also be tough for parents whose ski holidays are determined by the school holidays of Christmas, half-term and Easter. The former and latter will see increasingly unreliable ski conditions.

As a result, I envisage a decline in the uptake of skiing from countries that do not have easy access to mountains. For the British, Brexit exacerbates this.

This will not deter skiers who live within easy reach of the slopes. They can choose which days they ski and – if the prospects are not good – they can choose to do something else.

With the increased uptake of home-working, will there be people who make a choice of living near to the slopes to work, because they can? Will people who live in countries without easy access to ski resorts consider moving to the mountains as a quality of life choice?

This demographic may not be huge, but it will be impactful. Already it can be seen in property prices in and near ski resorts. Additionally it will increase the demand for amenities such as schools, as people may decide to bring up families in the mountains.

I already see an increased uptake of high altitude skiing, of ski touring and ski mountaineering. It has a low ecological footprint and the season often embraces periods of the year where resort skiing is not viable. it has a much lower commercial and environmental impact than lift-based skiing.

The occasional skiers will still come from Milan and Munich, from Lausanne and Lyon. I don’t see this segment declining in importance but it may be increasingly responsible for large swings in demand on higher resorts. As they did in the pandemic, some ski resorts may require people to book ahead at busy periods in order to manage capacity. Hotels will offer big discounts for mid-week, off-peak rooms, and even bigger premiums for peak season in premium locations.

Lower mountain resorts may decide to entirely re-invent themselves as primarily summer destinations. Many already have more tourists in the summer than in the winter. Traditionally a lot of these resorts have closed for the Spring and Autumn, but perhaps they will in future see these periods as an opportunity to promote holidays that are often at least as attractive at these time of the year as in the summer – walking, cycling, spas and gastronomic for example.

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Disastrous Christmas Ski Conditions

Lack of snow on the French Alps could spell disaster for ski season

The 2022/23 winter ski season got off to a slow start compared to the extraordinary 2021/22 season. There was a 24% decline in first time winter visitors and a 9% drop in overall sales. The main reason for the modest start is the warm temperatures after Christmas, which forced many ski lifts to close at lower altitudes. Additionally there was a short holiday season due to the public holidays falling on the weekends. Compared to the five-year average, the decrease in first-time visitors is 11%, but sales volume held up.

Many winter sports enthusiasts who did make it to the mountains, often having booked their Christmas in the Alps many months earlier, were unable to ski and snowboard at all. Lower resorts in some areas closed or were unable to keep open resort runs and beginner areas.

Freak weather conditions do happen, in this case from warm air being swept up from the South. However it is hard not to think global warming is playing a part. Meteorologists at Météo France reckon that snow cover in mid-level mountain areas could be reduced by up to 40% by 2050 as a result of global warming.

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The Russian Invasion of the Alps

Anybody skiing in the Alps in the last twenty years can’t but help notice the large number of Russian tourists. Whether it is hearing Russian spoken in the resorts or Cyrillic estate agent listings, the Russians had clearly taken to the Alps in a big way since the fall of the Iron Curtain. But this was a popular invasion.

The Russian influx was welcomed in particular by the ski resorts. Wealthy Russians weren’t shy about buying chalets and luxury items. Russians also filled the quieter ski period in January because it coincided with the Russian Orthodox Christmas vacation season. Courchevel in January, in particular, is usually awash with Russian billionaires, their entourages and their dosh.

Resorts saw a downturn in the number of middle-class Russians after the first Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014. However it did not affect the oligarchs who continued to flood in to the Alps, even though the resorts were sometimes less welcoming to the oligarchs than hitherto. In 2018 Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea football club, applied for, but was denied, residency in Verbier. Swiss police arrested Russian businessman Vladislav Klyushin on his way to Zermatt in 2021, and extradited him to the USA on charges of commercial espionage.

None the less, in the winter season 2018/19 Russians spent 140,000 night stays in hotels in the French Three Valleys resorts alone. Switzerland had 195,000 Russian night stays in the same season, with the main destinations being Verbier, Zermatt, St Moritz and Davos. Resorts in the Tyrol such as St Anton and Ischgl were particularly popular with a segment of the Russian market who liked the extensive pistes and hard core apres ski. Despite a small dip in 2014/15, luxury chalets in the main ski resorts continue to be purchased by wealthy Russians, or on behalf of wealthy Russians.

And it is not only wealthy and middle class Russians who enjoy the Alps. Le Monde established that Russian spooks have long favoured the Haute Savoie as a base for targeted assassinations around Europe, including that by the agents who planned the UK poisoning of ex Russian intelligence agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in March 2018.

Outside the Alps the Bulgarian ski resorts, such as Borovets and Bansko, have always been popular winter destinations for Russians. Before the Iron Curtain came down, I met many Russians in my ski trips to the country. There is a strong cultural bond between the people of Russia and the people of Bulgaria, and skiing in Bulgaria is significantly cheaper than Alpine ski resorts. Consequently Russian tourists have continued to flock to Bulgaria for winter sports even after the Iron Curtain came down and opened up the Alps as a ski destination. In the 2021/22 season Russian tourists came in even larger numbers because Bulgaria recognises Russian-made COVID vaccines.

The invasion of Ukraine by the Russian military in February 2022 has changed everything for Russian winter tourists. For the foreseeable future, it is going to be impractical for Russians to get to the Alps, and – in any case – not affordable for many of them as the rouble plunges against the Euro and the Russian economy goes into recession. For Russian tourists on holiday in Europe and caught unaware by the invasion, the sanctions from the EU and Switzerland have left tens of thousands stranded in European ski resorts. Middle class Russians face an expensive trip home since all flights out of the EU to Russia have been grounded. Additionally many ATMs and  establishments will no longer approve Russian debit and credit cards.

Switzerland has long been a popular destination for the wealthy, but their presence is no longer as welcome as it once was. The 2022 Verbier Festival has cancelled all Russian artists and the Music Director, Valery Gergiev, a prominent Putin apologist, has been asked to resign. Aligning with EU restrictions, eight Russian oligarchs resident in Switzerland with close ties to Putin have received travel bans. Many oligarchs will see their chalets sequestrated. At least a dozen private planes owned by wealthy Russians are stranded at Basel airport. Billions of dollars worth of assets managed or held by Swiss banks on behalf of wealthy Russians have been frozen.

Still, Belarus, North Korea, Syria and Eritrea remain friendly to the Russian regime and will no doubt welcome winter tourists from Russia – although the skiing options are limited. But there’s always Sochi, where the biggest ski resort, Krasnaya Polyana, has 102 km of piste and still serves Russian vodka.

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