Arlberg Hospiz, Austria

The village of St. Christoph sits just on the sheltered side of the Arlberg Pass, which separates the Austrian states of Tirol and Vorarlberg. It also marks the natural frontier between eastern and western Europe. At the pass itself, meltwater from a ten-foot snowbank lands on the crown of the road and divides: One trickle will make its way north through Germany to the North Sea via the Rhine, the other will flow east to the Danube, Vienna, and the Black Sea. By satisfying coincidence, this watershed in European geography also has a pivotal place in the history of skiing.

Hannes Schneider, who taught the world to make elegant, linked turns in the crouching Arlberg manner before he escaped across the Atlantic after the Nazi annexation of Austria, grew up in Stuben, a small village that guards the western approach to the pass. The Arlberg Ski School he founded—the first in Europe—is based at St. Anton, a glittering international resort on the Tirolean side of the pass. The lifts, trails, and vast powder fields of Austria’s finest ski area—called simply the Arlberg—straddle the pass. St. Christoph has a good case for being considered the home of skiing in Austria, although it is no more than a roadside hamlet dominated by two great institutions: the national training school for ski instructors and the Arlberg Hospiz, one of Austria’s oldest hotels. “Welcome home!” says the Hospiz’s Florian Werner. Alas, this beautiful hotel is not my home but his. He has recently returned from an apprenticeship odyssey that took him to Los Angeles (the Bel-Air and the Peninsula Beverly Hills) and Hong Kong (the Peninsula again). “It’s good to be back,” he says. I feel the same way. A notice board lists Florian’s twenty-nine predecessors in the office of Hospizwirt (hospice keeper), from Heinrich Findelkind (Henry the Foundling), who built a refuge for travelers at this high and notoriously stormy pass in 1386, to Florian’s father, Adi, who has handed over the reins of management but remains in residence and continues to officiate at wine-tasting competitions and other entertainments. “I do all the work now,” says Florian. “My father has all the fun.” Are the Hospizwirt’s duties any different from those of other hoteliers? “Not really,” says Florian, “but I do have to go out every evening to see if there are any travelers in difficulty.” And if there are? “Then I must take them in, of course.” This ancient tradition may sound promising, but be warned before you stage a late afternoon breakdown at the pass: While Florian may be duty bound to offer shelter, he is under no obligation to do so free of charge.

In the days before lifts, when skiing was an uphill sport, the great attraction of the Hospiz as a departure point was its extra fifteen hundred feet of elevation above St. Anton, which, with its abundant snowfall, good terrain, and easy access by train, was one of the leading early ski centers. By starting from St. Christoph, skiers saved an hour and a half of toil. From the Hospiz, they plodded up to the summits—using string wound under their skis for uphill traction—before skiing back down to St. Anton and Stuben, leaving tracks down magnificent runs now schussed by thousands every day of the winter.

One smoky evening in January 1901, a group of ski enthusiasts that included the Hospizwirt of the day, Oswald Trojer, founded the Arlberg Ski Club. Framed pages from its first logbook are on display at the Hospiz, with details of early tours. One of these pages has a sketch of a burly skier, dressed typically for the time: earflaps tied over his thick tweed hat, pipe between his teeth, and a single long pole held to one side for pushing, braking, or steering as required. “Trojer reitet nach St. Anton,” explains the caption (“Trojer rides toward St. Anton”). Snowboarders may be interested to note that they were not the first to think of themselves as riders on the snow.

The Arlberg has not lost a flake of its magic. Schneider’s Arlberg Ski School remains the most demanding ski academy in the world. Instructors from other resorts come on holiday and enroll, confident that there will be classes full of experts. Arlberg instructors, many of whom have also earned their mountain guide qualifications, think nothing of leading classes down untracked powder runs or the perilous rock-studded chutes that plunge from Schindler ridge. If you can’t keep up, try another resort. Lech or Zürs, for example. These two exclusive bolt-holes on the western side of the Arlberg Pass attract a clientele of rich and royal skiers to their perfectly manicured slopes and five-star hotels. In Lech, Princess Diana took her boys to the Arlberg, whereas the Dutch and Norwegian royal families prefer the Hotel Gasthof Post; Caroline of Monaco favors the Lorunser in Zürs.

Skiers and boarders who like their snow natural—steep and deep or steep and bumpy, depending on the weather—choose the St. Anton/St. Christoph/Stuben half of the Arlberg, where intervention to prepare and mark ski trails is kept to a minimum. All resorts honor the same lift ticket, but the two halves are not directly linked by lift. Lech and Zürs are a bit sniffy about encouraging the St. Anton riffraff to invade their snowy seclusion. Staying at St. Christoph combines the sporting pedigree of St. Anton with the good living and elegance of Lech and Zürs. Its chairlift is a useful side entrance to the ski area, skirting St. Anton’s morning queues. Gentle trails lead inexperienced performers back to St. Christoph, where the Hospiz Alm serves the best lunch in the Arlberg—on the sundeck or beside the fire, as the mercury dictates. Hotshots move swiftly up to the steeps of Schindler and Valluga or the long blast down to Stuben, whose modest tally of three slow chairlifts serves a feast of big powder skiing on underused north slopes.

“Most of our customers are strong skiers,” says Florian. “It’s not instruction they want, but sociable skiing and guiding to make sure they find the best snow.” The socializing goes on après-ski, with live music every evening, themed dinners, staff stage shows, and disco nights. There is nowhere else to go in St. Christoph, so the Hospiz makes its own fun, fueled by lethal cocktails, at which the Werners excel. Florian’s current priority is opening a spa by next spring that’s as outstanding as the cuisine at the Hospiz. It is a worthwhile objective, because in bad weather this snowy outpost above the treeline can be decidedly bleak. Since rail and road tunnels created an all-weather underpass, the Arlberg is no longer an essential thoroughfare, and it is sometimes closed after heavy snowfalls. If the ski lifts are also shut, as happened for ten days during the storms of 1999, guests are isolated. “Luckily we had plenty of lobster and champagne, so everyone had a good time,” recalls Florian. One could think of worse predicaments than being snowed in at the Hospiz.

Courchevel, France

Albertville is the capital of the Savoyard region known as the Tarentaise, a name that was associated with a breed of dairy cows until the postwar ski boom transformed it into the winter holiday capital of France. Now it stands for long-haul skiing as only the French can provide it. Unfortunately, the journey there can also be a long haul, and the Tarentaise spells traffic chaos on Saturdays in peak season, when 300,000 skiers on their way home and the same number heading to the slopes clash like advancing armies on the infamous Route Nationale 90.

Upstream from the bottleneck of Albertville, every mountain valley harbors a famous ski resort. The village of Moûtiers is the gateway to Les Trois Vallées, where four of the brightest stars in the galaxy of Tarentaise resorts—Courchevel, Méribel, Les Menuires, and Val Thorens—share a seamless network of 250 lifts serving 400 miles of ski trails. There is no serious argument about the resorts’ adopted subtitle: “le plus grand domaine skiable du monde.” The essence of the experience at Les Trois Vallées is freedom of movement. Trails and lifts meet at the crest of the dividing ridges to create perfectly smooth links between neighboring resorts. None of the intervalley links require great expertise, and skiers yo-yo between them in a matter of minutes, making light of journeys that take hours to complete by road. The higher slopes are wide open and treeless, allowing skiers the space to choose any line they like—for easy cruising, bumps, or God’s own snow, which may be deep powder, sun-softened corn, or loathsome crud, depending on luck and skill at reading the mountain. Gentle glacier slopes above Val Thorens provide a snow guarantee in case nature fails to provide, while sheltered forest trails below Courchevel offer good skiing on stormy days. Most of the big centers of accommodation—one hesitates to use the term village—are sited close to the timberline, between five and six thousand feet. They were planned, in theory at least, to balance bed capacity against that of the lifts to ensure a smooth flow of skier traffic. Courchevel 1850 works particularly well. It is the highest of four Courchevel resorts, which are stacked up the valley flank above the old village of Bozel and named for their altitude in meters (approximately). Shaped like a horseshoe, with gentle boulevard trails running down through the arms of the resort, it enables visitors to ski down to the lifts in the morning and to their doorstep in the evening. Les Trois Vallées’ resorts offer a view of the mountains and a ride in cushioned gondolas and high-speed, six-seater chairlifts that devour skiers at the rate of three thousand per hour, or would if only the French knew how to load in orderly fashion. Skiers can jostle for a place on Les Trois Vallées’ ffrst eight-seater chairlift. Every time a faster new lift replaces an old one, bedrooms can be added and everyone makes more money, which fuels the next round of investment in yet better lifts and snow grooming. The new lifts guarantee that no time is wasted: optimum value for the money, maximum downhill mileage—if the knees are strong enough. The pistes are manicured far beyond the usual happy-go-lucky Alpine standard, with a bulletproof underlay of man-made snow and a smooth surface dressed to putting green perfection every night. But for those of us who like to consider a skiing holiday as just that—a holiday, not just a week’s blitz of saturation sport—skiing on the Tarentaise production line can be a bit dispiriting. The pistes are more crowded every year. In the bar, you hear skiers discussing not the scenery or the wildlife but a new combination of chairlifts that cuts five minutes off the journey from Méribel to Val Thorens. Has it really come to this? What about enjoying the mountains, escaping the crowds? What happened to the charm of being in Europe, the savoir-vivre, the unhurried lunch? Where, in a word, is France? She is to be found at Courchevel 1850—the France of St-Germain and the Côte d’Azur: chic, cosmopolitan, sexy, and fun. Parisian France. Courchevel skiers stay in stylish and expensive hotels with Michelin-starred dining rooms. Courchevel skiers know how to live without counting the centimes. They land their jets at the Altiport, arriving directly from Paris or Nice or on a taxi flight from Geneva. They ski, of course, but in moderation, and devote as much attention to the pleasures of the table and the piste de danse. Après-ski is taken seriously. The skier who has lunched well, and in no hurry, has energy left for the evening campaign, unlike the blinkered Tarentaise ski nut who struggles to stay awake through supper. The day starts at a civilized hour with a parade outside the main lift station at the heart of the resort. This is La Croisette, named (no coincidence) after the waterfront catwalk at Cannes. Skiers and pedestrians with poodles in arms dawdle here, pretending they have someone to meet. In reality they are waiting to be seen and snapped by the army of photographers who divide their year between Courchevel and St-Tropez. After a few leisurely runs, it will be time for lunch. The central rendezvous, sited beside a trail so gentle that even the shakiest celebrity can ski there without fear of embarrassment, is the Chalet de Pierres. Flame-haired Yvette Saxe, immaculate in leather and mohair, is on triple-mwah terms with the king of Spain, Depardieu, Prost, and other regulars. Champagne is served on the deck by waiters in thick tweed hunting suits and hiking boots. Courchevel meets après-ski at Le Tremplin, a Parisian-style brasserie with separate zones for crêpes, oysters, and drinking with the ski instructors. On Friday evenings everyone—but everyone—dons cossack boots for the Russian evening at La Bergerie restaurant, where the staple intake is caviar and Stolichnaya (black and red, respectively). And so it goes, in piano bars, jazz bars, blues bars, and wine bars. With so much glamour on display, it is inevitable that Courchevel has its detractors. They would like us to believe that the skiing is too flat to keep serious practitioners interested. That depends upon where you look: Its home runs may be gentle—nothing wrong with that—but a fan of dark chutes beneath the top cable car are steep enough for a long fall and will test the nerve and technique of any skier. Bumps of formidable proportion grow on the west-facing face of Chanrossa, and heroic black runs plunge through the woods to Le Praz. Courchevel, in short, is the complete French ski resort.

Davos, Switzerland

When skiers arrived on the Alpine scene at the turn of the century, the ice skaters and toboggan aces of St. Moritz gave them a glacial welcome. “Plank-hopping cannot be considered a sport,” wrote the anonymous author of a 1901 winter guide. Although society beats a path there for jewelry auctions and polo tournaments on ice, the queen mother of Swiss winter resorts still takes the same de haut en bas view of skiing. The sparks of the new sport landed on more combustible ground at Davos, a neighbor of St. Moritz that developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as a health resort for tuberculosis sufferers. Even here, the fire spluttered for more than twenty years before catching. The Winter Sports Museum in Davos has a pair of Lappish skis that a local doctor named Alexander Spengler is thought to have used as early as 1873. Dr. Spengler soon abandoned his experiments. A local mountain guide, Tobias Branger, saw skis at an exhibition in Paris in 1878 and, sensing the potential for winter guiding at Davos, ordered a pair from Norway. When they finally arrived in 1889, without instructions, he had no idea how to use them. Branger and his brother, Johannes, persevered, and made their first big ski tour in March 1893, over a high pass to Arosa, where people thought they had flown in from the sky. The following winter, the Brangers had the good fortune to be engaged as ski instructors and guides by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—then plain Dr. Doyle—who had been brought to Davos by his wife’s tuberculosis but who spent more time indulging his passion for sport than doting on Mrs. Doyle. After six weeks of intensive training, the Brangers took the intrepid Dr. Doyle on a repeat of their ski tour to Arosa. His graphic account of this early adventure in Strand Magazine helped launch skiing as a fashionable winter sport—at least outside St. Moritz. A memorial in Davos salutes the creator of Sherlock Holmes “for bringing the new sport and the attractions of the Swiss Alps to the attention of the world.”

There is no tribute to an equally influential ski duo, Steele and Danday, who set off for Arosa in March 1895, turned right when they should have gone straight, and, after a night in a shepherd’s summer hut, found their way to a village below Klosters, where they caught a train back to Davos. The vast ski potential of the area now known as the Parsenn-Gotschna had been discovered by accident. This was the real breakthrough. The traffic to Arosa diminished to a trickle. On every fine winter morning, an army of ski enthusiasts would catch the train to Wolfgang—the highest point on the line between Davos and Klosters—and embark en masse on the 2,500-foot climb to Parsennfurka, the gateway to easy descents of six thousand feet to Klosters and its neighbors, Saas, Serneus, and Kublis. The north-facing flank of the Klosters valley is not steep, holds snow well, and brings skiers down to the railway for an easy journey back to base. It was a skier’s paradise, and still is. With the construction in 1931 of the Parsennbahn railway from downtown Davos to Weissfluhjoch, a ridge high above the Parsenn, ski tours became an effortless pleasure. The railway remains integral to the enjoyment of skiing at Davos and Klosters. All morning you zoom across a wide playground of open pistes at high altitude, beneath a tangle of lift cables and pylons. This is a pleasant enough ski area, but, now as then, the magic of the Parsenn resides in the variety of long runs to the valley. Steep runs beneath the flight path of the Prince of Wales cable car at Klosters—Gotschawang and Drostobel—are notorious knee-tremblers. This was the sector where a group of skiers that included Prince Charles triggered a fatal avalanche in 1988. In the other direction, a small cable car spans the gap between the Parsenn and the little-used Strela-Schatzalp sector, a connoisseur’s bolt-hole for uncrowded skiing away from the beaten track. Sitting in a time warp on its sunny balcony at the treeline, the Hotel Schatzalp is a reminder of the old days of the sanatorium business. Rug-wrapped guests recline on chaise longues in the glasshouse veranda, enjoying two more hours of direct sunlight than their counterparts on the valley floor. Or you can take the long cruise from Parsennfurka, stopping at the treeline for refreshment at one of the traditional Schwendi restaurants that welcome guests with poetry in Gothic script over the door. These leisurely ski rambles and the soporific train ride home give a rare taste of skiing as our grandparents once enjoyed it. Youth prefers the slopes on the opposite, north-facing side of Davos, where the world’s first T-bar lift was installed on the Bolgen in 1934. The lower slopes are now a snow park for acrobatic boarders and freestyle skiers. Big sport takes place higher up this mountain, at Jakobshorn: bumps and open powder fields of sustained pitch for high-adrenaline skiing and riding, straight down the fall line. A narrow trail snakes down through the woods, collecting adventurers who emerge from steep forest chutes and land with a thump on the path. Keen skiers should not be put off by the boarder culture on Jakobshorn: The snow conditions are good, and there is the powder run of a lifetime to be done, off the back of the mountain and down to Teufi, in the tranquil Dischma Valley. At Teufi, downhill excitement meets sedate winter leisure in a rustic farmhouse restaurant, where sleigh horses wait at the rail to return everyone to Davos after the last schnapps—boarders and skiers together. In the warm afterglow of a fine day’s sport and a good lunch, all conflicts are resolved at Davos, the Swiss headquarters of the sport that makes monotonous winter bearable. “What is it”—asks E. C. Richardson, founder of the Davos English Ski Club and the world’s first ski patrol on the Parsenn, in Ski-Running (1905)—“that makes the votary of the slender plank count the shortening days and greet with boyish glee the slowly falling flakes? It is the memory of past delights and the impatience to taste them again. He sees himself at the top of the mountain . . . catching his breath after a long walk and savouring the anticipation of ten long minutes of pure, swooping liberation.” Yes, but which mountain? Some skiers would opt for the Parsenn and the long cruise down to Kublis. I see myself at the top of Jakobshorn, skis pointing toward Teufi.