While much of haute skiing culture in South America centers around Chile’s Valle Nevado and ritzy Portillo, as well as Las Leñas in Argentina’s wine region of Mendoza, the Argentinian mountain town of San Carlos de Bariloche has a richer history of European immigration and, therefore, deeper roots in mountaineering and skiing. Like Aspen and Chamonix, Bariloche, as it’s commonly known, was a real town long before it became a ski center.
Photo top: In 1936, Innsbruck’s Hans Nöbl chose Cerro Catedral as the location for a
world-class ski resort. Courtesy Club Andino Bariloche.
The Early Years
The Cerro Catedral ski area’s birth and infancy are inextricably tied to Bariloche’s growth (translated from the Mapuche Indian dialect, the town’s name means “people from the other side of the mountain”). The mountain Cerro Catedral was named for its resemblance to a cathedral.
The small town of Bariloche in 1935, with Cerro Catedral five miles away, beyond Cerro Otto. Courtesy Ruben Macaya.
Argentina, like North America, is a melting pot, especially Bariloche. German and Swiss migrants first arrived in the town before the 20th century dawned, bringing many architectural, cultural and gastronomic influences that came to define the region.
Ruben Macaya grew up skiing on Cerro Catedral and raced for Argentina in the late 1960s. He later coached the U.S. Ski Team at the 1984 Winter Olympics, then coached in Aspen and Vail and for decades was the head coach for the Sun Valley race program. Macaya explains that the first European settlers arrived at Bariloche in 1891. Most of these folks arrived via the glacial lakes and Indian trails over the low pass from Chile, which had developed a thriving German community composed mostly of liberal refugees from the failed European revolutions of 1848.
Macaya relates that in 1903, Francisco Pascasio Moreno, a pioneering scientist and explorer, donated land near Bariloche for a national park. In 1922 Parque Nacional de Sur was established as the first national park in South America and the third in the Americas. Argentina’s powerful national parks office planned to make Bariloche into a touristy, European-looking town using its own public funds.
Beginning in 1913, a German named Ricardo Roth had the concession to the road and the boats that transported people between Chile and Bariloche, a four- or five-day trip. On the Argentine side was another German, shop owner Carlos Weitherholdt, now considered the founder of San Carlos de Bariloche, which sits at an elevation of 2,600 feet on the south shore of Lake Nahuel Huapi. In the other direction, toward Buenos Aires and the Atlantic, stretched the desert prairie, the Pampas. Crossing the Pampas via stagecoach or ox cart took four to six weeks—it was like crossing the Great Plains in North America.
Just before World War I, construction began on a narrow-gauge railroad from Buenos Aires to Bariloche and, eventually, to the Pacific coast. But the war halted investment by European and American financiers. Argentina profited from the war mainly by exporting beef and horses for use by European armies. Osvaldo Ancinas, the Bariloche-born Olympic skier who settled in Squaw Valley in 1960, jokes that Argentina raises “not only the fastest horses, but the best-tasting horses!”
After the war, Austrians, Italians and Slovenians arrived, fleeing the political and financial chaos accompanying the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At Bariloche they found a region as gorgeous as their beloved Alps and Dolomites.
The railroad from Buenos Aires finally reached Bariloche in 1934. At that point, wealthy folks from the city made the town and its surrounding mountains a holiday getaway.
By the 1940s, Bariloche had grown from a remote regional outpost of 1,000 inhabitants into a bustling city of 5,000 residents and Argentina’s epicenter of skiing and hiking, with around 55,000 annual visitors. After World War II another influx of Europeans—refugees from both Axis and Allied nations—came to start a new life in a setting that felt European.
Now close to a quarter of a million inhabitants live in the region (Bariloche has a permanent population of about 145,000), and as the gateway to Cerro Catedral, the city welcomes more than 600,000 tourists each winter alone. The Alpine influence still shines brightly, from torchlight descents down Catedral’s slopes during the annual Winter Festival (Fiesta de la Nieve) to the veal Milanese lunches pounded out for diners in the mountain refugios to locally made chocolates that would knock the socks off Ferrero Rocher.
A Ski Area Is Born
Juan Javier Neumeyer was one of the first physicians to establish a practice in Bariloche. Argentine-born to Swiss parents, he spent several years in Switzerland and became an accomplished climber and skier. In 1930, Neumeyer introduced the Bavarian gymnast and climber Otto Meiling to skiing; their climbing partners included Reynaldo Knapp, a British pilot who set up a tour-guiding service, and Swiss-trained surveyor Emilio Frey.
In 1931, these four friends founded the Club Andino de Bariloche to promote mountain sports. In 1934, Frey was appointed the first superintendent of Nahuel Huapi National Park. The four founders built seven refugios, the first one on 4,500-foot Cerro Otto, four miles west of Bariloche. Today, all seven huts continue to shelter skiers and climbers throughout the millions of acres of wilderness in both summer and winter.
Hans Nöbl fooling around with Antonia Lynch, 1936. Courtesy Ruben Macaya.
Catedral’s roots were planted shortly thereafter. In 1936 the National Parks Directorate signed a five-year contract with Innsbruck-born skier Hans Nöbl to scout a suitable location near Bariloche for a winter resort of international caliber. Nöbl came well-recommended: Working for the Agnelli family, owners of Fiat, he had helped manage the launch of Italy’s Sestriere ski resort in 1934 and then became head of its ski school. According to Andreas Praher, author of Austrian Skiing in the Nazi Era, Nöbl avoided entanglement with the Nazi element while he was in the Innsbruck Ski Club, but got the Sestriere gig after teaching Mussolini’s sons to ski.
Macaya explains that Nöbl came to Buenos Aires and charmed the wealthy skiers there. Arriving in Bariloche, he surveyed
Bavarian climber Otto Meiling became Catedral's second ski instructor and founded the local tourist office. CAB.
several potential sites for the big resort. “There were two other locations he considered, but at one of them you would have had to take a boat to get to the ski resort, and the other was closer to the Chilean border than to Bariloche, so they ruled it out,” explains Roberto Taddeo, nephew of Osvaldo Ancinas and a well-known ski coach.
Bariloche native Vicente Ojeda, who grew up to be a downhill ski champion, remembers that “Nöbl was tall and very skinny with big, blond hair. He was a classy dresser and an elegant skier. [Local] people didn’t really like him; he was arrogant and business-like, pinching money wherever he could, so people were a little wary of him. But he did a lot for the town of Bariloche, and we got Catedral because of him.”
Nöbl’s eventual choice bore sweet fruit almost immediately. In 1938—the year he settled full time in Bariloche—he directed the design of a tram to Cerro Catedral’s 6,300-foot summit. The tram parts were manufactured in Italy before World War II broke out but sat on a dock until trade resumed in 1945. In 1940 the first drag lifts were installed at Catedral, with financing arranged by Dr. Antonio Lynch, president of the Club Argentino de Ski (CAS), founded in 1938. The lifts ran
Built in 1939 near the summit, Refugio Lynch was Catedral's first hotel -- a deluxe dormitory, really. Bariloche.org
from the base area to an elevation of 5,600 feet. Two years later, the first ski lodge on Cerro Catedral was completed (managed by CAS), on what was then the highest point of the ski area. It was named Refugio Lynch, and it was there that three-year-old Ruben Macaya came to live with his mother, who worked as the hostel’s chef and housekeeping manager for the concessionaire, Carlos Oertle.
“Oertle ended up being like a grandfather to me,” Macaya says. “When [my mother] got the job cooking at Refugio Lynch, it was a five-star lodge. The whole thing was unbelievable. All the chairs and sofas were cowhide, hand hewn and hand painted, and there were paintings from famous European and South American [artists]. The place was first class. When my mom got there, she said, ‘Oh, my God! Where have I landed? This
The tram, designed in 1938, didn't arrive from Italy until after World War II, and opened in 1950. Courtesy Osvaldo Ancinas.
place is fantastic.’ It had beds in three big rooms, one for women and two for men. It had room for 15 women and 28 men.”
The resort lay within the national park, and development was funded largely by the national parks office. Park employees built the roads and infrastructure, at times carrying loads up the mountain on foot. The Argentinian government also invited private investment for hotels within the park. In one case, an Italian dowager, the Contessa Gambona, built the Hotel Catedral, and in 1944 the first base accommodations were opened to Buenos Aires elite.
Catalina Reynal, La Madrina (the Godmother)
Osvaldo Ancinas recalls, “I started skiing in August 1944, when I was 10 years old. We had a 1,500-meter surface lift, and the old cable car that was installed in 1950 took us up. I started skiing at the school of Catalina Reynal.” Reynal came from a wealthy cattle-ranching family, with thousands of acres on the Pampas. She became concerned that the children of the community couldn’t afford to ski. “She wanted the children of
Catalina Reynal finanched skiing for the Ski Club Bariloche kids. Courtesy Roberto Taddeo.
Bariloche to learn,” Ancinas says. “So she’d take all the kids up to the mountain in a truck with a cover on it. They had 18 feet of snow at the bottom of the mountain. She always told me Bariloche needed to keep the kids busy with skiing. Her friend Antonio Pelligrino got together the skis and boots and such. What a wonderful woman! She and Antonio were how I learned to love to ski. She introduced me to the sport I still love today.”
Macaya once visited Reynal at her home in Buenos Aires. “I asked her what drove her to help the kids,” he recalls. “She said that at the time, when you went to Hotel Catedral it was just the wealthy elite of Buenos Aires, and that the locals were shut out. ‘How can the locals learn to ski if we don’t help them?’ She got instructors to work with kids on the mountain. She was a visionary in that regard.”
Cosmopolitan Ski School
The first two ski instructors at Catedral were Nöbl and Meiling. “They did not like each other,” Macaya says. “Hans was more interested in big money and exposure, whereas Meiling was a real mountain man—he despised the wealthy people of Buenos Aires. His school was for the people, whereas Hans’s was more for the elites.”
At the end of World War II, Dinko Bertoncelj was 16 years old. When his father was shot, he fled from Slovenia to Austria and spent two years in a British-run refugee camp. He managed to climb and ski and was encouraged by an Austrian coach to imigrate to Argentina. Bertoncelj was still a teenager when he landed in Bariloche but soon became a leader in the mountaineering community, putting up first ascents and joining expeditions to the Himalaya and Antarctica.
“His first job was running the boilers at the Hotel Catedral,” says Macaya. “He skied with the family that owned the concessions.” Bertoncelj traveled back to Austria to get certified in ski instruction at St. Christof and also taught in the United States before returning to Bariloche. “By about 1960, he was head of the CAS ski school,” Macaya says. “There were so many Europeans in Bariloche, they were teaching each other to be instructors.” Eventually Bertoncelj took charge of ski instruction for the Argentine army.
Ancinas remembers taking lessons from a Polish instructor, Andres Nowortya. “He’d say, ‘You got to bend your knees some more or I’m not gonna teach you!’ And then we had another coach, he’d say, ‘We’re going to the mountain to be away from everybody and be closer to God.’ And we walked. We carried everything by foot. Even as a small boy, standing up with snow up to my chest! And we became the first members of the ski patrol in 1950–51. I was 16.”
Boom Years
The ski scene at Cerro Catedral boomed in the 1950s. Then airline service to Bariloche began in 1967.
Billy Reynal built an airline and hotels before acquiring the Catedral lift operations. He made skiing a middle-class sport for South Americans. Austral Airlines photo.
“Billy Reynal [nephew of Catalina] was a genius of marketing,” says Roberto Taddeo. Reynal, who had an American mother, left school early to work in the oil business. He loved to ski and loved airplanes, so he acquired Austral Airlines and organized a holding company, Lagos del Sur. Through this company, Reynal developed several new chairlifts on Catedral, which opened a vast bowl east of Refugio Lynch. Then he created Sol Jet, a tourist company, and built several mid-price hotels both in the city and at the ski area.
His goal was to democratize skiing, making it accessible to a middle-class market. Austral flew passenger routes day and night—shuttling skiers from Buenos Aires to stay in Lagos del Sur hotels in Bariloche and Catedral. But Austral competed with the government-owned Aerolineas Argentinas, and in 1980 the country’s military dictatorship nationalized Reynal’s businesses. Reynal left to live in the U.S. For a decade, the management of Catedral was split chaotically between two companies, one controlled by the dictatorship. Civilian rule returned after the 1982 Falklands War. Eventually Reynal and his son returned, and they resumed control of Catedral from 1997 to 2001.
Bariloche Today
“When I left Bariloche in 1960, there were only 25,000 people living there,” says Ancinas. “Now there are 160,000. A friend told me recently there were 21,000 people skiing on Catedral one day. It’s a big change.”
Ancinas traveled to his hometown last spring to celebrate his 90th birthday on the mountain. While there, he realized that some of the hazards have changed. “Now at the Refugio Lynch, they ski by at 100 miles an hour!” he says. “When I was young, you had to watch out because the foxes would steal your lunch!”
“Yes!” laughs Macaya. “Once, years ago, the foxes actually ate through the phone cables. They ate Osvaldo’s long thongs while he was having lunch at the top of the mountain.”
Catedral isn’t the only ski area near Bariloche—Winter Park is the “town” lift network on close-in Cerro Otto. But those who grew up there insist Catedral is by far the most beautiful. Ancinas calls it the most beautiful ski resort in the world.
By day skiers can shred 1,500 acres of in-bounds terrain and another 1,500 acres of backcountry, much of it with stunning views of colossal glacially carved lakes dotted with islands, smaller Alpine lakes, thousand-year-old deciduous and evergreen forests, and volcanos in both Chile and Argentina. (They still occasionally erupt.) Bootpack through a notch off the summit’s backside to access millions of acres of pristine national park. Sunrises and sunsets ignite the silhouetted mountains of Patagonia in a fiery burst of red, orange and gold. And by night, a billion stars illuminate the lazy haze of the Milky Way.
Jay Flemma practices law and recently moved from upstate New York to Boise, Idaho. He also writes about golf for websites owned by ABC, CBS and NBC.
How a sleepy Swiss resort underwent development on steroids.
Vail wanted to expand into Europe;
Andermatt needed a financial partner. ASO photo.
Switzerland’s Andermatt was among the earliest Alpine resorts. (The name, which translates to “at the meadow,” refers to the town’s location, near Gotthard Pass.) Well-to-do adventurers began summering here at the height of the Romantic era in the early 19th century, and skiing arrived with Swiss army trainees around 1890. Historic but sleepy for much of its existence, Andermatt went into fast-forward mode in 2005 with the arrival of an Egyptian billionaire, who invested $1.4 billion to create one of the most luxurious resorts in the Alps. In 2022, Vail Resorts upped the ante, buying a 55 percent stake in the development.
This is a tale with as many turns as a slalom course.
Set at 4,737 feet elevation (1,440 meters) in a dramatic valley with steep mountains on all sides, Andermatt is a charming town of venerable Alpine architecture, quaint shops and onion-domed churches. You are, indeed, in the land of Heidi.
It’s also surrounded by impressive slopes, with two main ski areas: Gemsstock, where intermediate and expert skiers can find challenging runs and a vertical drop of nearly 5,000 feet, and the gentler Nätschen/Oberalp area on the Gütsch, where easier slopes await on the sunnier side of the resort.
At first glance, it’s a very nice and well-situated resort, without the name recognition of Zermatt or St. Moritz. But then you spot the sleekly modern new hotels and apartments at the edge of town, with cutting-edge Alpine architecture that blends in with the centuries-old neighbors. Due to restrictive zoning, those new buildings are a rare sight in any Swiss ski resort, and they tell a remarkable story of revitalization, unfolding by the day.
Queen Victoria and the Swiss Army
Andermatt sits in the Urseren Valley and is part of the Saint-Gotthard Massif. It is essentially the center of the Alps, where north-south and east-west meet in Switzerland. This is also the headwaters of the Rhône River, flowing westward and south toward the Mediterranean. A few miles in the other direction, the Rhine River emerges and heads north and west to empty into the North Sea. The snowstorms of the central Alps also tend to converge here, making it one of the best powder spots in the country.
Three of Switzerland’s most significant mountain passes also meet here—the Furka, the Gotthard and the Oberalp—making the area an important crossroads even before Roman times. Archaeologists note traces of temporary Neolithic camps (around 4000 B.C.E.), but the earliest documented evidence of permanent settlement was by the Walsers, a Germanic tribe, in the second century C.E. They gave their name to the region and its modern inhabitants.
The main barrier to north-south communication across the region was the raging Reuss River. The first Teufelsbrücke (Devil’s Bridge) across the torrent was built in 1220, opening a mule-train track to Italy. Gradual improvements to the road eventually allowed the passage of horse-drawn coaches, beginning around 1775. The strategic bridge, located about half a mile north of Andermatt’s town center, was the object of a bloody battle in 1799 between Napoleon’s troops and detachments of the allied Russian and Austrian armies. But Napoleon then won the battle for Zurich, which rendered meaningless the Russian success at Andermatt.
The town provided hostel services to the mail coaches crossing Gotthard Pass daily. The very first Baedeker guidebook, published in 1854, listed hiking trails, bridle paths, coach roads and inns in the region. Soon enough, luxurious hotels went up. Queen Victoria came to stay at the Grand Hotel Bellevue, which opened in 1872. That year, work began on a rail tunnel under Gotthard Pass. When it opened in 1882, trans-Alpine traffic bypassed Andermatt and the tourist trade cratered.
A military rail spur came in 1914, serving
tourists as a ski lift from the valley. ASO,
However, Andermatt’s enviable strategic position kept it valuable for military purposes. The Swiss army established a major base here in the late 19th century, intended to be a wartime headquarters if the country were invaded. This required construction of a rail spur in 1914, which also enabled skiers to schuss about two miles and 1,200 vertical feet down the valley and ride the train back up. Andermatt got its first proper ski lift in 1937.
Throughout the mid-20th century, middle-class Swiss families favored the resort for holidays, even as wealthier international skiers went to better-known slopes like Gstaad, Zermatt and St. Moritz. The first cable car to the Gurschenfirn glacier on top of Gemsstock opened in 1964, allowing for summer skiing (since 2005, that glacier has been wrapped in a protective cloth to slow melting).
Around the same time, Hollywood came knocking, and scenes from Goldfinger were filmed here, including the famous car chase on the Furka Pass, with Sean Connery as James Bond driving his classic Aston Martin.
That brush with fame aside, Andermatt remained a quiet ski town in the middle of the country, a parochial vacation area that offered untouched powder stashes for savvy ski bums. It was like any other quaint Swiss town, though this one happened to have lift-serviced skiing at its doorstep. It was otherwise notable as a quick stop on the famous Glacier Express train that runs 180 miles between Zermatt and St. Moritz.
By the turn of the 21st century, the town was languishing, and the ski area was losing money. In 2004, the army base was downgraded to a training center, and the town lost most of its military revenue. The region faced economic crisis.
A Fast-Paced Revival
Then along came Samih Sawiris, an Egyptian billionaire. He’d amassed his fortune through his family’s investments in OCI N.V., a global producer and distributor of nitrogen and methanol products, as well as from his construction company, Orascom Development, which builds and operates resorts, including luxurious El Gouna on the Red Sea.
Alpine charm has attracted skiers for generations. ASO photo.
In 2005, Sawiris flew over Andermatt in a military helicopter, invited by a friend in the Swiss defense ministry who’d asked his opinion of what might be done following the departure of the army. Sawiris was impressed by the vast, open mountain terrain, the lack of development and the proximity to Geneva, Zurich and Milan. This eventually led to an invitation from the Swiss government to help develop Andermatt.
Sawiris agreed, with the provision that the authorities would permit him to sell real estate to foreigners, a relatively rare occurrence in Switzerland, which allows foreign ownership only in certain parts of the country. Those sales would help fuel the project. Sawiris also asked for 250 acres to create a mountain development, and the decision was put to local residents as a referendum. Ninety-six percent of Andermatt’s citizens agreed, and the regional and Swiss governments also backed the project—remarkable in a country where the bureaucracy can be daunting.
The reaction in the ski world went from eye-rolling to astonishment in the blink of an eye. Andermatt, that half-forgotten mountain town with remnants of an army presence and vintage infrastructure, was suddenly the recipient of development worth approximately $1.4 billion. The changes started with a bang, thanks to the construction of the Chedi, an opulent five-star hotel (and sister property of the Chedi Muscat in Oman) that was built where the Grand Hotel Bellevue had once stood. Winter rates start at around $1,000 a night; if you want to own, prices at the hotel’s residences begin at $1.8 million.
Then came three Michelin-starred restaurants and the brand-new, 650-seat Andermatt Concert Hall in 2019, with an opening performance by the Berlin Philharmonic. The 18-hole Andermatt Swiss Alps Golf Course was opened, and serious upgrades to the lift system have commenced. There will be 42 multi-million-dollar chalets, and an astonishing 42 luxury apartment buildings are under construction or planned. Prices at a complex like House Steinadler begin at $1.3 million for a one-bedroom unit, with the right to a parking space included (which the developers say is worth about $43,000). Some 30 more apartment buildings are scheduled to roll out in the coming decades, and there will be more four and five-star hotel properties. It is the biggest ski project the Alps (and perhaps the world) has ever seen, and Phase One was completed in 2019.
In terms of skiing, the resort stretches beyond Andermatt and its valley to the neighboring resorts of Sedrun and Disentis. The latter lies several valleys away and is famed for its astonishingly beautiful 8th-century Benedictine monastery and for being the heart of Romansch-speaking Switzerland. (The nation’s fourth language is Latin-based and the daily tongue of some 60,000 people.) It’s like traveling to a foreign country within the boundaries of a ski resort, albeit one with about 75 miles of varied terrain, 110 miles of trails and 33 lifts. Ski to Sedrun and take a ski safari to Disentis via the Oberalp Pass, and at day’s end you can board a train to return to Andermatt on the same tracks that the Glacier Express plies every day.
Vail Resorts Steps In
As if this weren’t enough, enter Vail Resorts. The company wanted to expand into Europe, and Andermatt needed a seasoned partner to shoulder some of the workload and financial responsibility for Phase Two of the development. It seemed a perfect fit.
This single chair opened in 1956.
The news became official on March 27, 2022, when Vail Resorts announced that it had made its first European acquisition as the new majority stakeholder of Switzerland’s Andermatt-Sedrun Sport AG—Andermatt for short. The company controls and operates all of Andermatt-Sedrun’s ski-related assets. That includes lifts, most on-mountain restaurants and the ski school operation.
Vail Resorts acquired a 55 percent ownership stake, while the former majority owners retain 40 percent. A smaller group of existing shareholders owns the remaining 5 percent. Vail’s investment is about $160 million, and the company has taken on the operating and marketing responsibility. Some $118 million will be used for improvements at Andermatt.
Vail also immediately included unlimited and unrestricted access to the resort on the 2022–23 Epic Pass. While this is Vail’s first ownership stake in a European resort, Andermatt joins 30 other Alpine resorts already part of the Epic Pass, including five in Austria’s Arlberg and three in France’s Trois Vallées. (Disentis is independently owned and is not part of the Epic Pass.)
Vail plans to replace lifts, upgrade snowmaking and improve and expand on-mountain dining. One senses that this is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s clear that the quiet days of Andermatt are history and that expansion is the route forward, especially with government involvement, private equity and now partial ownership by a publicly traded company. Yet to these eyes, Andermatt still looks relatively tranquil, with plenty of room for more skiers. In a year or two or three, things could be quite different.
Regular contributor Everett Potter wrote about the annual Swann Galleries ski-poster sale in the May-June 2023 issue.
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How a sleepy Swiss resort underwent development on steroids.
Vail wanted to expand into Europe;
Andermatt needed a financial partner. ASO photo.
Switzerland’s Andermatt was among the earliest Alpine resorts. (The name, which translates to “at the meadow,” refers to the town’s location, near Gotthard Pass.) Well-to-do adventurers began summering here at the height of the Romantic era in the early 19th century, and skiing arrived with Swiss army trainees around 1890. Historic but sleepy for much of its existence, Andermatt went into fast-forward mode in 2005 with the arrival of an Egyptian billionaire, who invested $1.4 billion to create one of the most luxurious resorts in the Alps. In 2022, Vail Resorts upped the ante, buying a 55 percent stake in the development.
This is a tale with as many turns as a slalom course.
Set at 4,737 feet elevation (1,440 meters) in a dramatic valley with steep mountains on all sides, Andermatt is a charming town of venerable Alpine architecture, quaint shops and onion-domed churches. You are, indeed, in the land of Heidi.
It’s also surrounded by impressive slopes, with two main ski areas: Gemsstock, where intermediate and expert skiers can find challenging runs and a vertical drop of nearly 5,000 feet, and the gentler Nätschen/Oberalp area on the Gütsch, where easier slopes await on the sunnier side of the resort.
At first glance, it’s a very nice and well-situated resort, without the name recognition of Zermatt or St. Moritz. But then you spot the sleekly modern new hotels and apartments at the edge of town, with cutting-edge Alpine architecture that blends in with the centuries-old neighbors. Due to restrictive zoning, those new buildings are a rare sight in any Swiss ski resort, and they tell a remarkable story of revitalization, unfolding by the day.
Queen Victoria and the Swiss Army
Andermatt sits in the Urseren Valley and is part of the Saint-Gotthard Massif. It is essentially the center of the Alps, where north-south and east-west meet in Switzerland. This is also the headwaters of the Rhône River, flowing westward and south toward the Mediterranean. A few miles in the other direction, the Rhine River emerges and heads north and west to empty into the North Sea. The snowstorms of the central Alps also tend to converge here, making it one of the best powder spots in the country.
Three of Switzerland’s most significant mountain passes also meet here—the Furka, the Gotthard and the Oberalp—making the area an important crossroads even before Roman times. Archaeologists note traces of temporary Neolithic camps (around 4000 B.C.E.), but the earliest documented evidence of permanent settlement was by the Walsers, a Germanic tribe, in the second century C.E. They gave their name to the region and its modern inhabitants.
The main barrier to north-south communication across the region was the raging Reuss River. The first Teufelsbrücke (Devil’s Bridge) across the torrent was built in 1220, opening a mule-train track to Italy. Gradual improvements to the road eventually allowed the passage of horse-drawn coaches, beginning around 1775. The strategic bridge, located about half a mile north of Andermatt’s town center, was the object of a bloody battle in 1799 between Napoleon’s troops and detachments of the allied Russian and Austrian armies. But Napoleon then won the battle for Zurich, which rendered meaningless the Russian success at Andermatt.
The town provided hostel services to the mail coaches crossing Gotthard Pass daily. The very first Baedeker guidebook, published in 1854, listed hiking trails, bridle paths, coach roads and inns in the region. Soon enough, luxurious hotels went up. Queen Victoria came to stay at the Grand Hotel Bellevue, which opened in 1872. That year, work began on a rail tunnel under Gotthard Pass. When it opened in 1882, trans-Alpine traffic bypassed Andermatt and the tourist trade cratered.
A military rail spur came in 1914, serving
tourists as a ski lift from the valley. ASO,
However, Andermatt’s enviable strategic position kept it valuable for military purposes. The Swiss army established a major base here in the late 19th century, intended to be a wartime headquarters if the country were invaded. This required construction of a rail spur in 1914, which also enabled skiers to schuss about two miles and 1,200 vertical feet down the valley and ride the train back up. Andermatt got its first proper ski lift in 1937.
Throughout the mid-20th century, middle-class Swiss families favored the resort for holidays, even as wealthier international skiers went to better-known slopes like Gstaad, Zermatt and St. Moritz. The first cable car to the Gurschenfirn glacier on top of Gemsstock opened in 1964, allowing for summer skiing (since 2005, that glacier has been wrapped in a protective cloth to slow melting).
Around the same time, Hollywood came knocking, and scenes from Goldfinger were filmed here, including the famous car chase on the Furka Pass, with Sean Connery as James Bond driving his classic Aston Martin.
That brush with fame aside, Andermatt remained a quiet ski town in the middle of the country, a parochial vacation area that offered untouched powder stashes for savvy ski bums. It was like any other quaint Swiss town, though this one happened to have lift-serviced skiing at its doorstep. It was otherwise notable as a quick stop on the famous Glacier Express train that runs 180 miles between Zermatt and St. Moritz.
By the turn of the 21st century, the town was languishing, and the ski area was losing money. In 2004, the army base was downgraded to a training center, and the town lost most of its military revenue. The region faced economic crisis.
A Fast-Paced Revival
Then along came Samih Sawiris, an Egyptian billionaire. He’d amassed his fortune through his family’s investments in OCI N.V., a global producer and distributor of nitrogen and methanol products, as well as from his construction company, Orascom Development, which builds and operates resorts, including luxurious El Gouna on the Red Sea.
Alpine charm has attracted skiers for generations. ASO photo.
In 2005, Sawiris flew over Andermatt in a military helicopter, invited by a friend in the Swiss defense ministry who’d asked his opinion of what might be done following the departure of the army. Sawiris was impressed by the vast, open mountain terrain, the lack of development and the proximity to Geneva, Zurich and Milan. This eventually led to an invitation from the Swiss government to help develop Andermatt.
Sawiris agreed, with the provision that the authorities would permit him to sell real estate to foreigners, a relatively rare occurrence in Switzerland, which allows foreign ownership only in certain parts of the country. Those sales would help fuel the project. Sawiris also asked for 250 acres to create a mountain development, and the decision was put to local residents as a referendum. Ninety-six percent of Andermatt’s citizens agreed, and the regional and Swiss governments also backed the project—remarkable in a country where the bureaucracy can be daunting.
The reaction in the ski world went from eye-rolling to astonishment in the blink of an eye. Andermatt, that half-forgotten mountain town with remnants of an army presence and vintage infrastructure, was suddenly the recipient of development worth approximately $1.4 billion. The changes started with a bang, thanks to the construction of the Chedi, an opulent five-star hotel (and sister property of the Chedi Muscat in Oman) that was built where the Grand Hotel Bellevue had once stood. Winter rates start at around $1,000 a night; if you want to own, prices at the hotel’s residences begin at $1.8 million.
Then came three Michelin-starred restaurants and the brand-new, 650-seat Andermatt Concert Hall in 2019, with an opening performance by the Berlin Philharmonic. The 18-hole Andermatt Swiss Alps Golf Course was opened, and serious upgrades to the lift system have commenced. There will be 42 multi-million-dollar chalets, and an astonishing 42 luxury apartment buildings are under construction or planned. Prices at a complex like House Steinadler begin at $1.3 million for a one-bedroom unit, with the right to a parking space included (which the developers say is worth about $43,000). Some 30 more apartment buildings are scheduled to roll out in the coming decades, and there will be more four and five-star hotel properties. It is the biggest ski project the Alps (and perhaps the world) has ever seen, and Phase One was completed in 2019.
In terms of skiing, the resort stretches beyond Andermatt and its valley to the neighboring resorts of Sedrun and Disentis. The latter lies several valleys away and is famed for its astonishingly beautiful 8th-century Benedictine monastery and for being the heart of Romansch-speaking Switzerland. (The nation’s fourth language is Latin-based and the daily tongue of some 60,000 people.) It’s like traveling to a foreign country within the boundaries of a ski resort, albeit one with about 75 miles of varied terrain, 110 miles of trails and 33 lifts. Ski to Sedrun and take a ski safari to Disentis via the Oberalp Pass, and at day’s end you can board a train to return to Andermatt on the same tracks that the Glacier Express plies every day.
Vail Resorts Steps In
As if this weren’t enough, enter Vail Resorts. The company wanted to expand into Europe, and Andermatt needed a seasoned partner to shoulder some of the workload and financial responsibility for Phase Two of the development. It seemed a perfect fit.
This single chair opened in 1956.
The news became official on March 27, 2022, when Vail Resorts announced that it had made its first European acquisition as the new majority stakeholder of Switzerland’s Andermatt-Sedrun Sport AG—Andermatt for short. The company controls and operates all of Andermatt-Sedrun’s ski-related assets. That includes lifts, most on-mountain restaurants and the ski school operation.
Vail Resorts acquired a 55 percent ownership stake, while the former majority owners retain 40 percent. A smaller group of existing shareholders owns the remaining 5 percent. Vail’s investment is about $160 million, and the company has taken on the operating and marketing responsibility. Some $118 million will be used for improvements at Andermatt.
Vail also immediately included unlimited and unrestricted access to the resort on the 2022–23 Epic Pass. While this is Vail’s first ownership stake in a European resort, Andermatt joins 30 other Alpine resorts already part of the Epic Pass, including five in Austria’s Arlberg and three in France’s Trois Vallées. (Disentis is independently owned and is not part of the Epic Pass.)
Vail plans to replace lifts, upgrade snowmaking and improve and expand on-mountain dining. One senses that this is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s clear that the quiet days of Andermatt are history and that expansion is the route forward, especially with government involvement, private equity and now partial ownership by a publicly traded company. Yet to these eyes, Andermatt still looks relatively tranquil, with plenty of room for more skiers. In a year or two or three, things could be quite different.
Regular contributor Everett Potter wrote about the annual Swann Galleries ski-poster sale in the May-June 2023 issue.
(Photo top:) In most years, more than 600 skiers push off in a mass start, for a brutal five-mile, 5,000-foot descent marking the season's final run. Der Weisse Rausch race starts at 5:00pm; the piste surface has been churned and mogulled by recreational traffic all day. Ski Arlberg photo.
Under a starry sky, five skiers slowly descend a steep slope using wooden skis, lace-up leather boots and bamboo ski poles. Dressed in woolen blazers with buttons, Tyrolean-style trousers and felt hats with feathers, they employ Hannes Schneider’s Arlberg technique—a stem christie in the fall line, parallel across the hill—to maneuver the long, edgeless skis.
This flashback on snow happened during the opening ceremony of the FIS Alpine Junior World Ski Championships, staged in St. Anton am Arlberg in January 2023. I’d made the trek to Austria’s Tyrol to watch my son Aidan compete in the races—and to explore the history of the resort that calls itself the “cradle of skiing.”
Early Days
St. Anton has evolved in the 600 years since a swineherd named Heinrich Findelkind founded the Hospiz St. Christoph, which offered refuge to travelers caught in blizzards while trying to cross the Arlberg Pass. Back then, St. Anton relied on agriculture and the transport of commodities like salt and silver for its economy.
In January, 1903, the St Anton Ski Club held trial
races for members, including women. Bad weather cancelled the "open" race in March.
“Life was really, really hard back then,” says Yannick Rumler, press officer for the Arlberg region and a history buff who shows me around the Museum of St. Anton am Arlberg. Opened in 1980, the museum is housed in the erstwhile Villa Trier, an elegant Art Nouveau chalet built around 1910 as a seasonal getaway for German industrialist and entrepreneur Bernhard Trier. One wood-paneled room is dedicated to ski equipment through the ages, from long wooden skis with Huitfeldt bindings, circa 1905, to Austrian racing champ Karl Schranz’s 1962 Kneissls to the short, shapely Salomon Equipe 10 3Vs on which Mario Matt won the 2001 slalom world championship here. Known as “der Arlberg Adler”—eagle of the Arlberg—Matt now owns the Krazy Kanguruh, a legendary St. Anton après-ski spot.) Elsewhere in the museum, displays chronicle St. Anton’s trajectory from poor farming village to booming international ski resort.
And so the first "general" race was held in 1904. The long-distance race was an uphill-downhill slog over the top of Galzig in deep snow. Yannick Rumler/Tourist Board photos
The first person to ski here may have been a Norwegian engineer who came to work on the Arlberg tunnel in the 1880s. But most sources credit Johann Müller, a priest from Warth, as the first. He ordered a pair of skis from Sweden and used them to commute to Lech. In 1901, the Ski-Club Arlberg was founded, and the first ski lessons were taught in Zürs by Viktor Sohm of Bregenz in 1906. Back then, mostly locals learned the sport.
In 1907, Hannes Schneider, St. Anton’s most famous ski legend, started teaching guests at the Hotel Post (built in 1896 by Carl Schuler) and founded the Ski School
Arlberg ski school, 1921. St Anton Tourist Board/Rumler
Arlberg in 1920. He taught his Arlberg technique all over the world, from Japan to New Hampshire. By the early 1920s, people were traveling to the Arlberg to learn to ski. Amazingly, until 1937, when Austria’s first surface lift was installed in Zürs, many of those early skiers were earning their turns by hiking up (although some did make use of a combination of a motor and toboggan that dragged skiers uphill).
Hannes Schneider and Arnold Lunn.
Schneider’s Arlberg progression was all the rage until around 1953, when another local ski instructor, Professor Stefan Kruckenhauser, introduced a novel short-swing turn
in St. Christoph, a part of St. Anton. Wedeln was a dramatic legs-glued-together, heel-thrusting kind of move.
Hints of this history play out in town, too. Inside the Great Valluga, a ski shop that opened in St. Anton in 2020, walls are lined with old hanza sticks, which farmers once used to dry out harvested hay, each branded with the family’s initials. “We want to give old stuff new life as artistic design elements,” says shop manager Philipp Traxl, whose family has been in St. Anton for four generations. The centerpiece of the shop: The front desk is a work of art made from a 175-year-old Nessler spruce with a trunk diameter of nearly four feet.
How the Railroad Changed St. Anton—Twice.
Slopes near the village were crowded by 1930, though skiers still climbed for their turns.
At the museum, Rumler shows me old black-and-white photos detailing the milestones that changed the face of St. Anton. In 1880, the emperor of Austria, Franz Josef, envisioned his empire connected by a railway system, including the longest tunnel in Austria. The Arlberg Railway Tunnel broke ground in 1880 and, with the aid of some 5,000 workers, took only four years to build.
After World War I, Austria was impoverished. St Anton got its Galzigbahn in 1937, three years after trams went up in France and Switzerland.
“It was a big accomplishment because they didn’t have any laser tracking or GPS technology,” Rumler says. St. Anton was a major stop on the railway’s east-west route from Innsbruck to Zurich, with the tracks running straight through the center of town. Climbers and skiers began flocking to the Arlberg. It was the place to be.
Over the decades, St. Anton grew in popularity, traffic increased, and trains grew longer. By the 1980s, skiers on the way to the slopes often needed to wait 20 minutes to cross the tracks. When the resort earned the bid to host the 2001 FIS Alpine World Ski Championships, organizers knew the railway was a logistical snafu. The tracks, which had run through town for a century, were rerouted to the south along the edge of the mountains, serving a brand-new station. The relocation monumentally changed the face of St. Anton. The former railway line was transformed into an open space called the Kunstmeile (art mile), a walking path lined with sculptures. The move also made way for a new race finish-line arena and WellCom, a state-of-the-art wellness and recreation center with swimming pools, saunas, a brine steam bath and an event space. The old stone train station is now a private home.
St. Anton on the Silver Screen
Local hero Karl Schranz won World Cup titles in 1969 and 1970.
Call me starry-eyed, but I loved the museum’s display of movies filmed at the resort. Der Schwarze Blitz (1958) featured the skiing prowess of triple-gold Olympic champ Toni Sailer. The title is Sailer’s nickname, Black Lightning. (The name needs explanation: It could have been “Blitz from Kitz,” but local rival Anderl Molterer had an equal claim, so black-haired Sailer became Schwarze Blitz and white-haired Molterer Weisse Blitz.) In the 1967 Cold War spy thriller The Double Man, Britt Ekland, sporting a fur-trimmed jacket, is chased across the slopes of St. Anton by Yul Brynner. Arguably the best ski-racing movie of all time, Downhill Racer (1969), used footage of actual races, including Schranz at St. Anton. The movie depicts (among other races) St. Anton’s Arlberg-Kandahar race, first staged in 1928. Trier’s villa turned museum also served as the chalet in 2011’s Chalet Girl, starring Felicity Jones.
Ski chase scenes in the 1931 film Der Weisse Rausch, starring Hannes Schneider, Leni Riefenstahl and Rudi Matt, are the inspiration for one of the resort’s most thrilling modern traditions. On closing day each April, a race by that name kicks off with a mass start at the top of the 9,222-foot Valluga Mountain, with 555 skiers and snowboarders racing down a 5.6-mile long course that includes a brutal 500-foot uphill climb and 4,430 vertical feet of descent. The record time is seven minutes, nine seconds, but you’re free to do a leisurely half an hour if, for instance, you ski in a ball gown. It’s a new cult classic.
The Interconnectedness of It All
Modern resort planners had a vision to make the Arlberg the largest interconnected ski resort in Austria. The addition of the Flexenbahn gondola in December 2016 made it possible. Today, you can ski from St. Anton to Zürs to Lech to Warth and back. I join Jan and Guy Colclough, a British couple who winter in St. Anton, to ski to Lech. It’s possible to make it to Lech and back in a day, but you have to start early and ski hell for leather.
St Anton hosts the Alpine World Championships, 1970
Guy and Jan recommend we start late, then après-ski in Lech and take the bus back to St. Anton. “We do not ski back,” Guy tells me. “The run back is just so boring above Lech.” They may be transplants, but I figure the Colcloughs are onto something. We follow the Run of Fame, an 85-kilometer ski circuit with pit stops along the way dedicated to the Arlberg’s ski pioneers and movie stars, many of whom are memorialized in a museum at the Flexenbahn’s top station. We ski past St. Christoph, Stuben and Zürs, stopping at the Trittkopf BBQ station for coffee. Originally constructed in 1962 as a lift terminal, the building now has a modern aesthetic, though the architects incorporated original elements like the massive cable supports and bull wheels. Cantilevered floor-to-ceiling windows frame the Alps, which stretch to the horizon.
A few hours later, we load the Zugerbergbahn, our 10th and final ski lift of the day. A special gondola car pulls in with a table covered in white linen and set with champagne glasses and bottles of Moët & Chandon. “This must be our car,” Jan says to the lift op. “No, ma’am. You must call ahead.” No matter. We head for the Balmalp ski hut at the top for hearty steak salads, a charcuterie board—and prosecco. We will have our bubbles.
When we finally descend into Lech, we have one last celebratory glass of prosecco at the outdoor terrace of the Hotel Krone, a backdrop I recognize from Renée Zellweger’s 2004 film Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. We toast to Princess Diana, who brought William and Harry here for an annual ski vacation in the early 1990s. Then we hop on the bus back to St. Anton.
History in the Hotel
At the museum, I’d seen the 12-kilogram crystal globe won in 1969 by St. Anton ski racer Gertrud Gabl. Schranz took the men’s title that year (and the next), but to see his trophies, I visit his eponymous hotel. His two World Cup globes are the centerpiece of the massive display case in the hotel’s bar. The lobby walls are plastered with photos of the racer posing with celebrities and dignitaries like Audrey Hepburn, Jean-Claude Killy and Queen Elizabeth II. Today Schranz’s wife, Evelyn, and daughters Anna, Christiane and Kathi manage the hotel. You can find them presiding over the check-in desk, running the restaurant or mingling with guests at the bar.
Haute Moments
Clocktower still stands guard downtown.
Between races, my son and I make the pilgrimage to the top of the Valluga, where the Tyrol meets the Vorarlberg. We ride the Galzigbahn, built in 2006 and featuring a Ferris wheel design: gondola cars enter at the top of a giant glass terminal, then rotate counterclockwise to pick up riders on the ground floor. At the top, we transfer to Vallugabahn I, a 45-person cable car built in 1954 that delivers us to Vallugabahn II, where cabins hold just five passengers. It’s like riding a telephone booth through the sky. From the top, we’re treated to spectacular 360-degree panoramas spanning five countries. It is, literally and figuratively, a high point of our trip.
That night, Aidan and I splurge on a seven-course dinner at the Alpin Gourmet Stube, a restaurant that’s earned three Gault Millau Haubens (chef hats), located inside Hotel Gletscherblick (glacier view). When founders Paula and Robert Kathrein opened the original pension in 1966, you could still see the tongue of the Hohe Riffler glacier. Today, the four-star property is run by three generations of their family. Daughter Sandra Jehle-Kathrein, along with her husband, Christian, operates the hotel with help from the granddaughters—Sophia is the patissière and Johanna works in reception and the restaurants.
As we dine on braised veal cheek and beetroot foam soup, our white-gloved waiter delivers new cutlery from a felt box with each course. Sandra sits with her 83-year-old mom at a corner table in the bar, chatting and sipping white wine. “It’s a nightly mother-daughter tradition,” Sandra
explains to me.
While the place honors its history—all three generations of women wear dirndls at dinnertime and the room keys are huge metal lumps—the family is also committed to modernizing in meaningful ways. They’ve renovated the suites with sleek, contemporary finishes and added a luxurious wellness spa with saunas, a steam bath, salt cave and a shimmering blue indoor pool.
Back at the races the next day, I marvel at the talent of today’s fastest junior racers. Benefiting from state-of-the-art equipment and wearing skintight speed suits, they hurtle expertly down St. Anton’s World Cup racecourse, including the notorious and precipitous Eisfall. In 2023, their technique is all pure carving. Hannes Schneider’s Arlberg turn? That’s history.
Boulder-based journalist and author Helen Olsson had a 10-year career at Skiing Magazine. This is her first article for Skiing History.
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Wed, 08/17/2022 - 1:32 PM
The cradle of skiing is all grown up.
(Photo top:) In most years, more than 600 skiers push off in a mass start, for a brutal five-mile, 5,000-foot descent marking the season's final run. Der Weisse Rausch race starts at 5:00pm; the piste surface has been churned and mogulled by recreational traffic all day. Ski Arlberg photo.
Under a starry sky, five skiers slowly descend a steep slope using wooden skis, lace-up leather boots and bamboo ski poles. Dressed in woolen blazers with buttons, Tyrolean-style trousers and felt hats with feathers, they employ Hannes Schneider’s Arlberg technique—a stem christie in the fall line, parallel across the hill—to maneuver the long, edgeless skis.
This flashback on snow happened during the opening ceremony of the FIS Alpine Junior World Ski Championships, staged in St. Anton am Arlberg in January 2023. I’d made the trek to Austria’s Tyrol to watch my son Aidan compete in the races—and to explore the history of the resort that calls itself the “cradle of skiing.”
Early Days
St. Anton has evolved in the 600 years since a swineherd named Heinrich Findelkind founded the Hospiz St. Christoph, which offered refuge to travelers caught in blizzards while trying to cross the Arlberg Pass. Back then, St. Anton relied on agriculture and the transport of commodities like salt and silver for its economy.
In January, 1903, the St Anton Ski Club held trial
races for members, including women. Bad weather cancelled the "open" race in March.
“Life was really, really hard back then,” says Yannick Rumler, press officer for the Arlberg region and a history buff who shows me around the Museum of St. Anton am Arlberg. Opened in 1980, the museum is housed in the erstwhile Villa Trier, an elegant Art Nouveau chalet built around 1910 as a seasonal getaway for German industrialist and entrepreneur Bernhard Trier. One wood-paneled room is dedicated to ski equipment through the ages, from long wooden skis with Huitfeldt bindings, circa 1905, to Austrian racing champ Karl Schranz’s 1962 Kneissls to the short, shapely Salomon Equipe 10 3Vs on which Mario Matt won the 2001 slalom world championship here. Known as “der Arlberg Adler”—eagle of the Arlberg—Matt now owns the Krazy Kanguruh, a legendary St. Anton après-ski spot.) Elsewhere in the museum, displays chronicle St. Anton’s trajectory from poor farming village to booming international ski resort.
And so the first "general" race was held in 1904. The long-distance race was an uphill-downhill slog over the top of Galzig in deep snow. Yannick Rumler/Tourist Board photos
The first person to ski here may have been a Norwegian engineer who came to work on the Arlberg tunnel in the 1880s. But most sources credit Johann Müller, a priest from Warth, as the first. He ordered a pair of skis from Sweden and used them to commute to Lech. In 1901, the Ski-Club Arlberg was founded, and the first ski lessons were taught in Zürs by Viktor Sohm of Bregenz in 1906. Back then, mostly locals learned the sport.
In 1907, Hannes Schneider, St. Anton’s most famous ski legend, started teaching guests at the Hotel Post (built in 1896 by Carl Schuler) and founded the Ski School
Arlberg ski school, 1921. St Anton Tourist Board/Rumler
Arlberg in 1920. He taught his Arlberg technique all over the world, from Japan to New Hampshire. By the early 1920s, people were traveling to the Arlberg to learn to ski. Amazingly, until 1937, when Austria’s first surface lift was installed in Zürs, many of those early skiers were earning their turns by hiking up (although some did make use of a combination of a motor and toboggan that dragged skiers uphill).
Hannes Schneider and Arnold Lunn.
Schneider’s Arlberg progression was all the rage until around 1953, when another local ski instructor, Professor Stefan Kruckenhauser, introduced a novel short-swing turn
in St. Christoph, a part of St. Anton. Wedeln was a dramatic legs-glued-together, heel-thrusting kind of move.
Hints of this history play out in town, too. Inside the Great Valluga, a ski shop that opened in St. Anton in 2020, walls are lined with old hanza sticks, which farmers once used to dry out harvested hay, each branded with the family’s initials. “We want to give old stuff new life as artistic design elements,” says shop manager Philipp Traxl, whose family has been in St. Anton for four generations. The centerpiece of the shop: The front desk is a work of art made from a 175-year-old Nessler spruce with a trunk diameter of nearly four feet.
How the Railroad Changed St. Anton—Twice.
Slopes near the village were crowded by 1930, though skiers still climbed for their turns.
At the museum, Rumler shows me old black-and-white photos detailing the milestones that changed the face of St. Anton. In 1880, the emperor of Austria, Franz Josef, envisioned his empire connected by a railway system, including the longest tunnel in Austria. The Arlberg Railway Tunnel broke ground in 1880 and, with the aid of some 5,000 workers, took only four years to build.
After World War I, Austria was impoverished. St Anton got its Galzigbahn in 1937, three years after trams went up in France and Switzerland.
“It was a big accomplishment because they didn’t have any laser tracking or GPS technology,” Rumler says. St. Anton was a major stop on the railway’s east-west route from Innsbruck to Zurich, with the tracks running straight through the center of town. Climbers and skiers began flocking to the Arlberg. It was the place to be.
Over the decades, St. Anton grew in popularity, traffic increased, and trains grew longer. By the 1980s, skiers on the way to the slopes often needed to wait 20 minutes to cross the tracks. When the resort earned the bid to host the 2001 FIS Alpine World Ski Championships, organizers knew the railway was a logistical snafu. The tracks, which had run through town for a century, were rerouted to the south along the edge of the mountains, serving a brand-new station. The relocation monumentally changed the face of St. Anton. The former railway line was transformed into an open space called the Kunstmeile (art mile), a walking path lined with sculptures. The move also made way for a new race finish-line arena and WellCom, a state-of-the-art wellness and recreation center with swimming pools, saunas, a brine steam bath and an event space. The old stone train station is now a private home.
St. Anton on the Silver Screen
Local hero Karl Schranz won World Cup titles in 1969 and 1970.
Call me starry-eyed, but I loved the museum’s display of movies filmed at the resort. Der Schwarze Blitz (1958) featured the skiing prowess of triple-gold Olympic champ Toni Sailer. The title is Sailer’s nickname, Black Lightning. (The name needs explanation: It could have been “Blitz from Kitz,” but local rival Anderl Molterer had an equal claim, so black-haired Sailer became Schwarze Blitz and white-haired Molterer Weisse Blitz.) In the 1967 Cold War spy thriller The Double Man, Britt Ekland, sporting a fur-trimmed jacket, is chased across the slopes of St. Anton by Yul Brynner. Arguably the best ski-racing movie of all time, Downhill Racer (1969), used footage of actual races, including Schranz at St. Anton. The movie depicts (among other races) St. Anton’s Arlberg-Kandahar race, first staged in 1928. Trier’s villa turned museum also served as the chalet in 2011’s Chalet Girl, starring Felicity Jones.
Ski chase scenes in the 1931 film Der Weisse Rausch, starring Hannes Schneider, Leni Riefenstahl and Rudi Matt, are the inspiration for one of the resort’s most thrilling modern traditions. On closing day each April, a race by that name kicks off with a mass start at the top of the 9,222-foot Valluga Mountain, with 555 skiers and snowboarders racing down a 5.6-mile long course that includes a brutal 500-foot uphill climb and 4,430 vertical feet of descent. The record time is seven minutes, nine seconds, but you’re free to do a leisurely half an hour if, for instance, you ski in a ball gown. It’s a new cult classic.
The Interconnectedness of It All
Modern resort planners had a vision to make the Arlberg the largest interconnected ski resort in Austria. The addition of the Flexenbahn gondola in December 2016 made it possible. Today, you can ski from St. Anton to Zürs to Lech to Warth and back. I join Jan and Guy Colclough, a British couple who winter in St. Anton, to ski to Lech. It’s possible to make it to Lech and back in a day, but you have to start early and ski hell for leather.
St Anton hosts the Alpine World Championships, 1970
Guy and Jan recommend we start late, then après-ski in Lech and take the bus back to St. Anton. “We do not ski back,” Guy tells me. “The run back is just so boring above Lech.” They may be transplants, but I figure the Colcloughs are onto something. We follow the Run of Fame, an 85-kilometer ski circuit with pit stops along the way dedicated to the Arlberg’s ski pioneers and movie stars, many of whom are memorialized in a museum at the Flexenbahn’s top station. We ski past St. Christoph, Stuben and Zürs, stopping at the Trittkopf BBQ station for coffee. Originally constructed in 1962 as a lift terminal, the building now has a modern aesthetic, though the architects incorporated original elements like the massive cable supports and bull wheels. Cantilevered floor-to-ceiling windows frame the Alps, which stretch to the horizon.
A few hours later, we load the Zugerbergbahn, our 10th and final ski lift of the day. A special gondola car pulls in with a table covered in white linen and set with champagne glasses and bottles of Moët & Chandon. “This must be our car,” Jan says to the lift op. “No, ma’am. You must call ahead.” No matter. We head for the Balmalp ski hut at the top for hearty steak salads, a charcuterie board—and prosecco. We will have our bubbles.
When we finally descend into Lech, we have one last celebratory glass of prosecco at the outdoor terrace of the Hotel Krone, a backdrop I recognize from Renée Zellweger’s 2004 film Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. We toast to Princess Diana, who brought William and Harry here for an annual ski vacation in the early 1990s. Then we hop on the bus back to St. Anton.
History in the Hotel
At the museum, I’d seen the 12-kilogram crystal globe won in 1969 by St. Anton ski racer Gertrud Gabl. Schranz took the men’s title that year (and the next), but to see his trophies, I visit his eponymous hotel. His two World Cup globes are the centerpiece of the massive display case in the hotel’s bar. The lobby walls are plastered with photos of the racer posing with celebrities and dignitaries like Audrey Hepburn, Jean-Claude Killy and Queen Elizabeth II. Today Schranz’s wife, Evelyn, and daughters Anna, Christiane and Kathi manage the hotel. You can find them presiding over the check-in desk, running the restaurant or mingling with guests at the bar.
Haute Moments
Clocktower still stands guard downtown.
Between races, my son and I make the pilgrimage to the top of the Valluga, where the Tyrol meets the Vorarlberg. We ride the Galzigbahn, built in 2006 and featuring a Ferris wheel design: gondola cars enter at the top of a giant glass terminal, then rotate counterclockwise to pick up riders on the ground floor. At the top, we transfer to Vallugabahn I, a 45-person cable car built in 1954 that delivers us to Vallugabahn II, where cabins hold just five passengers. It’s like riding a telephone booth through the sky. From the top, we’re treated to spectacular 360-degree panoramas spanning five countries. It is, literally and figuratively, a high point of our trip.
That night, Aidan and I splurge on a seven-course dinner at the Alpin Gourmet Stube, a restaurant that’s earned three Gault Millau Haubens (chef hats), located inside Hotel Gletscherblick (glacier view). When founders Paula and Robert Kathrein opened the original pension in 1966, you could still see the tongue of the Hohe Riffler glacier. Today, the four-star property is run by three generations of their family. Daughter Sandra Jehle-Kathrein, along with her husband, Christian, operates the hotel with help from the granddaughters—Sophia is the patissière and Johanna works in reception and the restaurants.
As we dine on braised veal cheek and beetroot foam soup, our white-gloved waiter delivers new cutlery from a felt box with each course. Sandra sits with her 83-year-old mom at a corner table in the bar, chatting and sipping white wine. “It’s a nightly mother-daughter tradition,” Sandra
explains to me.
While the place honors its history—all three generations of women wear dirndls at dinnertime and the room keys are huge metal lumps—the family is also committed to modernizing in meaningful ways. They’ve renovated the suites with sleek, contemporary finishes and added a luxurious wellness spa with saunas, a steam bath, salt cave and a shimmering blue indoor pool.
Back at the races the next day, I marvel at the talent of today’s fastest junior racers. Benefiting from state-of-the-art equipment and wearing skintight speed suits, they hurtle expertly down St. Anton’s World Cup racecourse, including the notorious and precipitous Eisfall. In 2023, their technique is all pure carving. Hannes Schneider’s Arlberg turn? That’s history.
Boulder-based journalist and author Helen Olsson had a 10-year career at Skiing Magazine. This is her first article for Skiing History.
After a century, it's still the peak of Vancouver.
Settlers to the young city of Vancouver at the end of the 19th century became enthralled by the beauty and challenge of an unnamed mountain north of their harbor. The Indigenous people had no name for it, because they made a good living fishing and hunting along the shoreline and rarely ventured into the hills. Perhaps only because no one seemed to have climbed it, some believed the mountain unclimbable. On October 5, 1894, the intrepid Sydney Williams proved them wrong and became the first European to climb to the top. For good measure, he returned a week later with three other adventurers, one of whom shot a blue grouse. From then on, despite later efforts by civic officials to change its name to Mount Vancouver, the peak was known as Grouse Mountain.
Photo above: In 1976, the 100-passenger Skyride red tram opened, instantly becoming Grouse’s signature experience.
Williams’ expeditions attracted media attention and the peak became a local landmark. One night in 1902, the city of Vancouver turned off its street lights so that residents could better see a huge bonfire built by climbers on Grouse’s summit. Today, The Cut ski run and the Peak chair are always lighted at night and can be seen from as far south as Bellingham, Washington, a two-hour drive south.
Short cummute from the big city. Grouse
Mountain photo.
The Indigenous people may or may not have climbed it, but the mountain had a place in their legends. A dream story, retold in the 1911 book The Lost Island by Coast Salish writer Pauline Johnson, foretold the colonization of the region by settlers arriving in Vancouver from all parts of the world. In this myth, a troubled shaman climbs to the top of Grouse Mountain, where he fasts and camps for three days. He looks down on the forests, rivers and small settlements where the White Man lives and is granted a vision into the future where the trees are cut down, streets are laid out in a perfect grid, and people live and work, packed into tall concrete towers. The shaman’s premonition eerily describes the view that Grouse’s 1.5 million annual visitors see as they peer down on the city.
Tyee Ski Runners Club was
founded in 1929. Photo: Grouse
Mountain Ski Club.
At the turn of the 20th century, reaching the 4,000-foot summit from town required a harbor traverse by ferry, a streetcar ride across North Vancouver, an overnight stay in a ramshackle “base camp” shelter owned by a local printer and a stout hike upward among giant cedars and fir trees.
Schemes abounded to take advantage of Grouse’s airy outpost and, as an early brochure indicates, its “year-round snow.” In 1910, plans were laid for an Alpine-style cog railway to wind up the mountain’s forested slopes to access a deluxe hotel. There was even a scheme to install the world’s most powerful telescope. World War I derailed those ideas, but in 1926, an automobile toll road opened to appeal to a new leisure class. Scandinavian loggers began felling giant trees to make a rudimentary ski trail called, quite descriptively, The Cut. The Grouse Mountain Lodge was finished a short time later, and by 1935, more than a hundred small ski shacks were scattered across the mountain. Lift skiing arrived in 1949 with the erection of the third chairlift in all of Canada. In 1966, a new tramway, the blue Skyride, opened. In 1976, the red Skyride tram launched, which made Grouse Mountain’s aerial tramway system the largest in North America.
Grouse Mountain Ski Clubbers, c. 1928.
The club merged with Tyee in the 1950s.
GMSC photo.
Along with Stanley Park, Granville Island and the nearby Capilano Suspension Bridge, Grouse Mountain is now a can’t-miss destination for visitors to Vancouver. The Skyride is as famous in its own way as Barcelona’s Montjuic cable car or the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway and the numerous trams and cog railways of the Swiss Alps. On a clear day, keeping in mind that Vancouver averages 200 days of rain annually, visitors enjoy a 360-degree panorama encompassing downtown’s concrete canyons; the verdant forest canopy of Stanley Park; the flat, fertile farms of the Fraser Valley; Mount Baker, the San Juan Islands and the Olympic Mountains in Washington; the blue-black waters of the Salish Sea; and the breathtaking spine of Vancouver Island.
Historically, Grouse’s financial fortunes have been a mixed bag. The hill’s original owners went bankrupt during the Great Depression and the City of Vancouver took over its operation until local newspaper barons the Cromie family added Grouse to their business portfolio in 1953.
Spring skiing in 1934. GMSC.
Grouse Mountain truly established itself as a four-season tourism brand under the ownership of the McLaughlin family, from 1989 to 2017. Tens of thousands of cruise ship passengers flooded into the city for 16 weeks each summer, and a huge new convention center built for the 2010 Winter Olympics drew big crowds for events like TED conferences. Thus was created a ready-made audience, and Grouse obliged with numerous summer activities. The mountain hosts everything from zip-lining and Indigenous storytelling to nature programs (performing owls and eagles, a grizzly sanctuary), ropes courses and helicopter tours.
In the early 1990s, endurance athletes started training on a ridiculously steep hiking trail that became known as the Grouse Grind. Rising 800 meters (2,624 vertical feet) in 2.5 kilometers (1.55 miles), the Grind fell into the must-do category for outdoor adventurers within five years. Grouse Mountain marketers promote it as “Mother Nature’s Stairmaster.” The success of the Grouse Grind has, alas, led to the odd wayward hiker needing help courtesy of the North Shore Rescue team, whose staging area for many mountain missions is the nearby heli-pad at Capilano Reservoir.
Chair opened in 1949 and was
promoted by summer bus tours.
The Cut ski run is Grouse Mountain’s most visible slope, especially when it’s covered in fresh snow or lit up at night. In the 1950s, the Vancouver Sun co-sponsored ski lessons for beginners; during the ’60s, the Grouse Mountain rental shop and ski school were in the vanguard of the Headway learn-to-ski program (akin to the Graduated Length Method). Beginning in 1966, ski school director Ornulf Johnsen guaranteed that novice skiers would be able to ski the Cut after participating in the learn-to-ski program—and offered unlimited lessons until that skill level was achieved. Though the run faces south and lies at an elevation where snow can turn to rain, an efficient snowmaking system ensures that The Cut is well groomed and provides the perfect surface for learning. A well-manicured terrain park has its own lift to ensure that New Schoolers and novices are kept separate.
The really interesting Grouse skiing is over on the east face, where the Olympic Express chairlift feeds approximately 1,200 vertical feet of surprisingly good fall-line skiing. Bring your fat skis after a fresh dump to glide through glades studded by old-growth fir and cedars. In the ’70s, some of Canada’s top freestyle skiers danced down mogul runs like Hades, Purgatory and Inferno, and the mountain hosted Canada’s first World Cup freestyle skiing championship in 1978.
During the 2010 Winter Games, Grouse neatly outfoxed its rival Cypress Mountain (site of the freestyle skiing and snowboarding events) by hosting NBC’s Today Show for the duration of the event.
Because Grouse has such a diversified portfolio of four-season, on-mountain activities, the learn-to-ski lesson package and season’s pass are quite affordable. The Skyride red tram hauls skiers from the parking lot to the Observatory day lodge (formerly the Grouse Nest), and on midweek evenings passengers chatter in a cacophony of languages. You’ll meet German, Spanish and Italian exchange students—many of them expert skiers—shoulder-to-shoulder with recent Asian immigrants, some of whom have never seen snow before. Just six miles south twinkle the lights of a cosmopolitan city of 2.5 million, but Grouse’s location at the edge of North America’s vast wilderness is captivating, whether you’re carving up fresh corduroy or snowshoeing a nature trail. Grouse also serves as home base for one of Canada’s largest adaptive skiing programs. Moreover, since 1929, thousands of skiers have trained for races hosted by the Grouse Mountain Tyee Ski Club.
In 2026, Grouse Mountain has big plans to celebrate its centenary. Despite the chill placed on the international tourism industry by Covid, Grouse is proceeding with plans to build a high-speed gondola, replacing the blue tram Skyride, which will greatly increase its capacity to handle crowds at peak periods.
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After a century, it's still the peak of Vancouver.
Settlers to the young city of Vancouver at the end of the 19th century became enthralled by the beauty and challenge of an unnamed mountain north of their harbor. The Indigenous people had no name for it, because they made a good living fishing and hunting along the shoreline and rarely ventured into the hills. Perhaps only because no one seemed to have climbed it, some believed the mountain unclimbable. On October 5, 1894, the intrepid Sydney Williams proved them wrong and became the first European to climb to the top. For good measure, he returned a week later with three other adventurers, one of whom shot a blue grouse. From then on, despite later efforts by civic officials to change its name to Mount Vancouver, the peak was known as Grouse Mountain.
Photo above: In 1976, the 100-passenger Skyride red tram opened, instantly becoming Grouse’s signature experience.
Williams’ expeditions attracted media attention and the peak became a local landmark. One night in 1902, the city of Vancouver turned off its street lights so that residents could better see a huge bonfire built by climbers on Grouse’s summit. Today, The Cut ski run and the Peak chair are always lighted at night and can be seen from as far south as Bellingham, Washington, a two-hour drive south.
Short cummute from the big city. Grouse
Mountain photo.
The Indigenous people may or may not have climbed it, but the mountain had a place in their legends. A dream story, retold in the 1911 book The Lost Island by Coast Salish writer Pauline Johnson, foretold the colonization of the region by settlers arriving in Vancouver from all parts of the world. In this myth, a troubled shaman climbs to the top of Grouse Mountain, where he fasts and camps for three days. He looks down on the forests, rivers and small settlements where the White Man lives and is granted a vision into the future where the trees are cut down, streets are laid out in a perfect grid, and people live and work, packed into tall concrete towers. The shaman’s premonition eerily describes the view that Grouse’s 1.5 million annual visitors see as they peer down on the city.
Tyee Ski Runners Club was
founded in 1929. Photo: Grouse
Mountain Ski Club.
At the turn of the 20th century, reaching the 4,000-foot summit from town required a harbor traverse by ferry, a streetcar ride across North Vancouver, an overnight stay in a ramshackle “base camp” shelter owned by a local printer and a stout hike upward among giant cedars and fir trees.
Schemes abounded to take advantage of Grouse’s airy outpost and, as an early brochure indicates, its “year-round snow.” In 1910, plans were laid for an Alpine-style cog railway to wind up the mountain’s forested slopes to access a deluxe hotel. There was even a scheme to install the world’s most powerful telescope. World War I derailed those ideas, but in 1926, an automobile toll road opened to appeal to a new leisure class. Scandinavian loggers began felling giant trees to make a rudimentary ski trail called, quite descriptively, The Cut. The Grouse Mountain Lodge was finished a short time later, and by 1935, more than a hundred small ski shacks were scattered across the mountain. Lift skiing arrived in 1949 with the erection of the third chairlift in all of Canada. In 1966, a new tramway, the blue Skyride, opened. In 1976, the red Skyride tram launched, which made Grouse Mountain’s aerial tramway system the largest in North America.
Grouse Mountain Ski Clubbers, c. 1928.
The club merged with Tyee in the 1950s.
GMSC photo.
Along with Stanley Park, Granville Island and the nearby Capilano Suspension Bridge, Grouse Mountain is now a can’t-miss destination for visitors to Vancouver. The Skyride is as famous in its own way as Barcelona’s Montjuic cable car or the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway and the numerous trams and cog railways of the Swiss Alps. On a clear day, keeping in mind that Vancouver averages 200 days of rain annually, visitors enjoy a 360-degree panorama encompassing downtown’s concrete canyons; the verdant forest canopy of Stanley Park; the flat, fertile farms of the Fraser Valley; Mount Baker, the San Juan Islands and the Olympic Mountains in Washington; the blue-black waters of the Salish Sea; and the breathtaking spine of Vancouver Island.
Historically, Grouse’s financial fortunes have been a mixed bag. The hill’s original owners went bankrupt during the Great Depression and the City of Vancouver took over its operation until local newspaper barons the Cromie family added Grouse to their business portfolio in 1953.
Spring skiing in 1934. GMSC.
Grouse Mountain truly established itself as a four-season tourism brand under the ownership of the McLaughlin family, from 1989 to 2017. Tens of thousands of cruise ship passengers flooded into the city for 16 weeks each summer, and a huge new convention center built for the 2010 Winter Olympics drew big crowds for events like TED conferences. Thus was created a ready-made audience, and Grouse obliged with numerous summer activities. The mountain hosts everything from zip-lining and Indigenous storytelling to nature programs (performing owls and eagles, a grizzly sanctuary), ropes courses and helicopter tours.
In the early 1990s, endurance athletes started training on a ridiculously steep hiking trail that became known as the Grouse Grind. Rising 800 meters (2,624 vertical feet) in 2.5 kilometers (1.55 miles), the Grind fell into the must-do category for outdoor adventurers within five years. Grouse Mountain marketers promote it as “Mother Nature’s Stairmaster.” The success of the Grouse Grind has, alas, led to the odd wayward hiker needing help courtesy of the North Shore Rescue team, whose staging area for many mountain missions is the nearby heli-pad at Capilano Reservoir.
Chair opened in 1949 and was
promoted by summer bus tours.
The Cut ski run is Grouse Mountain’s most visible slope, especially when it’s covered in fresh snow or lit up at night. In the 1950s, the Vancouver Sun co-sponsored ski lessons for beginners; during the ’60s, the Grouse Mountain rental shop and ski school were in the vanguard of the Headway learn-to-ski program (akin to the Graduated Length Method). Beginning in 1966, ski school director Ornulf Johnsen guaranteed that novice skiers would be able to ski the Cut after participating in the learn-to-ski program—and offered unlimited lessons until that skill level was achieved. Though the run faces south and lies at an elevation where snow can turn to rain, an efficient snowmaking system ensures that The Cut is well groomed and provides the perfect surface for learning. A well-manicured terrain park has its own lift to ensure that New Schoolers and novices are kept separate.
The really interesting Grouse skiing is over on the east face, where the Olympic Express chairlift feeds approximately 1,200 vertical feet of surprisingly good fall-line skiing. Bring your fat skis after a fresh dump to glide through glades studded by old-growth fir and cedars. In the ’70s, some of Canada’s top freestyle skiers danced down mogul runs like Hades, Purgatory and Inferno, and the mountain hosted Canada’s first World Cup freestyle skiing championship in 1978.
During the 2010 Winter Games, Grouse neatly outfoxed its rival Cypress Mountain (site of the freestyle skiing and snowboarding events) by hosting NBC’s Today Show for the duration of the event.
Because Grouse has such a diversified portfolio of four-season, on-mountain activities, the learn-to-ski lesson package and season’s pass are quite affordable. The Skyride red tram hauls skiers from the parking lot to the Observatory day lodge (formerly the Grouse Nest), and on midweek evenings passengers chatter in a cacophony of languages. You’ll meet German, Spanish and Italian exchange students—many of them expert skiers—shoulder-to-shoulder with recent Asian immigrants, some of whom have never seen snow before. Just six miles south twinkle the lights of a cosmopolitan city of 2.5 million, but Grouse’s location at the edge of North America’s vast wilderness is captivating, whether you’re carving up fresh corduroy or snowshoeing a nature trail. Grouse also serves as home base for one of Canada’s largest adaptive skiing programs. Moreover, since 1929, thousands of skiers have trained for races hosted by the Grouse Mountain Tyee Ski Club.
In 2026, Grouse Mountain has big plans to celebrate its centenary. Despite the chill placed on the international tourism industry by Covid, Grouse is proceeding with plans to build a high-speed gondola, replacing the blue tram Skyride, which will greatly increase its capacity to handle crowds at peak periods.
How Vermonters, Austrians and Swiss launched skiing below the Mason-Dixon Line.
Yankee skiers often assume that Mount Washington is the highest peak in the eastern United States, but it ain’t. More than a dozen mountains in the southern Appalachians are higher, and they even host some 17 ski resorts. The base village at Beech Mountain, North Carolina, sits more than 1,000 feet higher than the top of Mt. Mansfield’s lift network, Vermont’s highest.
Photo top of page: During 1962 construction of Blowing Rock Ski Lodge in North Carolina, early snow sent skiers hiking. Photo courtesy Appalachian Ski Mountain.
Glen Plake at Beech Mountain. Randy
Johnson collection.
Mile-high ranges wring snow out of storms coming from the moist Mississippi Basin and the Great Lakes. More important, typical overnight temperatures at those elevations allow great snowmaking—on average eight hours each night from mid-December to late March. On a winter’s day at the summit of 5,506-foot Beech Mountain, a New England skier would feel right at home.
Long before the first skiers arrived, early settlers noted the wintry weather. In 1752, Bishop Augustus Spangenberg wanted to establish a new settlement but was turned back by a blizzard near what would become Boone, North Carolina. During the Revolutionary War, the Overmountain Men trudged through September snow while crossing Roan Mountain en route to defeat Loyalists at the Battle of Kings Mountain, South Carolina. And in 1856, snow stopped mail carriers crossing the Blue Ridge Mountains near Cheat Mountain, today the site of West Virginia’s Snowshoe Mountain ski resort—with average snowfall of almost 200 inches.
Moreover, cool summers meant that by the late 1800s, the high mountains bloomed with resort hotels like Blowing Rock’s Green Park Inn (opened in 1891), where the rich escaped baking lowlands. Railroads made access easy in some spots.
Waldo Holden
During the Depression years, lift-served resorts triggered a boom in skiing across the northern states, and skiers who moved south brought the sport with them. In 1936, federal employees from New England and the Sierra founded the Ski Club of Washington, D.C. (SCWDC). Their first project was to find snow nearby. Waldo Holden, a D.C. lawyer from Vermont and the club’s first president, scouted Washington’s environs and found snowy hills in Glencoe, Pennsylvania, 150 miles northwest of Washington. The club ran seven ski trains there during that first winter.
Thereafter, snow proved unreliable and the search roamed south. In 1939, workers from the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) cut the Whiskey Hollow Trail at New Germany State Park in western Maryland, billed as “the only expert trail south of the Mason-Dixon line.” It was only a three-hour drive from Washington. For the 1939-40 ski season, SCWDC persuaded nearby landowners Samuel and Lorraine Otto to operate a 600-foot rope tow powered by a 1935 Dodge truck donated by the CCC.
About the same time, the new Great Smokies Ski Club began skiing at Newfound Gap, on the border between North Carolina and Tennessee. Great Smoky Mountains National Park opened in 1934, and the Park Service built an all-weather road through the gap. Skiers could drive to a parking lot at the top of the pass. It was a 500-mile drive from D.C. but only 50 from Knoxville, Tennessee.
Legend has it that after World War II, airline pilots flying in and out of Washington National Airport spotted large snowdrifts in the hills near Davis, West Virginia, about 150 miles west of D.C. There SCWDC connected two mega-drifts with tows in 1951 to create Driftland, which evolved into the Cabin Mountain Ski Area a few years later.
Bob Barton
Thus far, every ski tow in the area had been a ski club venture. That changed in 1955, when Bob Barton, then 27 and a graduate of the University of Virginia law school and the United States Air Force, set up a commercial tow on Weiss Knob, adjacent to Driftland. He wanted to put in snowmaking, but the site was too windy. So in 1959 he moved to the lee side of the ridge, a mile away, and put in the pipes and pumps. That winter the U.S. Weather Bureau measured 452 inches of natural snow in the Canaan Valley. Barton couldn’t keep his access road open. Today, the area operates as the White Grass Ski Touring Center.
Austrian Sepp Kober came from
Stowe to lead Virginia's
Homestead Resort, 1959. Randy
Johnson collection.
Sepp Kober
Barton felt he’d need the cachet of a European ski instructor at the new hill. He contacted the Austrian consulate in New York and was referred to Joseph H. “Sepp” Kober, an Austrian instructor then teaching at Stowe. When Kober showed up in 1958, said Barton, “I could see immediately that there was nothing in Canaan Valley appropriate to a man of his background. Sepp was destined for greater things.”
So Kober moved to the classic spa and golf resort the Homestead, in Hot Springs, Virginia, and launched a ski area there in 1959. With a mere 2,500-foot base elevation and in the snow shadow of West Virginia’s high peaks, the Homestead may have been the first ski area designed from the start to subsist solely on machine-made snow. It opened as the only other resort to build a Cranmore-style Skimobile lift, serving an easy 700-foot vertical.
The ski area occupied less than 2 percent of the Homestead’s property, but the 483-room hotel, with a history stretching back before the Revolutionary War, had the marketing power to pull in skiers. Kober made the most of the modest terrain. He repped for Beconta and other ski-industry companies, and installed a cadre of Austrian instructors, many of whom became influential elsewhere in North America. In 2009, on the Homestead’s 50th anniversary of skiing, Kober was inducted into the U.S. National Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame. He died a year later, at age 88.
Rolf Lanz and Claude Anders
On the western side of the Smokies, a ski resort debuted above Gatlinburg, Tennessee, in 1962. The city owned land along the Newfound Gap Road, including a 3,300-foot peak about 2,000 feet above town. It offered a potential 600 vertical feet of skiing, and the city leased the land to a private ski club.
Rolf Lanz, a native of Bern, Switzerland, had moved to Atlanta in 1953 and worked there as a hairdresser. He became a Gatlinburg regular and in 1965 jumped at the chance to become ski school director. In 1973, real estate developer Claude Anders built a 120-passenger aerial tram—at the time the world’s largest—from the town to the mountain, then purchased the resort itself two years later. Lanz dubbed it Ober Gatlinburg.
Tony Krasovic led on-hill
development at Blowing Rock.
Appalachian Ski Mountain photo.
Bill Thalheimer and Tony Krasovic
In 1962, the first of today’s resorts came to the High Country corner of North Carolina, when movie theater entrepreneur Bill Thalheimer debuted the Blowing Rock Ski Lodge. Ski pros were sparse, and Sepp Kober connected Thalheimer with Austrian instructor Tony Krasovic. He agreed to come south to run a resort but admitted later, “I didn’t know the only thing there was a parking lot!”
While Thalheimer handled financing and publicity, Krasovic managed the hill. He kept the resort making snow as the business struggled. Kober and Krasovic were the only Southerners at the founding of the National Ski Areas Association at Colorado’s Broadmoor Resort in 1962.
In 1968, after a stockholder squabble, Grady Moretz and four partners arranged a friendly takeover from the bank. The resort was renamed Appalachian Ski Mountain and found success as a family-friendly resort. The next winter, Jim Cottrell and Jack Lester arrived to promote their ironically named French-Swiss Ski College. By selling ski lessons in bulk to colleges and even to the U.S. Army and Navy (from 1969–76), they taught GLM skiing to hundreds of thousands of new skiers—an outrageous tale that deserves its own article in a future issue of Skiing History.
Kober protegés Manfred and Horst Locher opened Bryce Resort in Virginia in 1965. The 500-foot-vertical ski area had the advantage of location, less than two hours from downtown Washington. The Lochers, in turn, imported more European pros, including Gunther Jöchl, a Bavarian-educated Austrian ski racer, in 1971.
Doc Brigham launched Beech,
Sugar and Snowshoe resorts.
Doc Brigham
Dr. Thomas “Doc” Brigham, who grew up in Vermont and was an avid skier, was stranded in Birmingham, Alabama, teaching dentistry at the University of Alabama. He also maintained a private practice. His wife showed him an article in Reader’s Digest about snowmaking at the Homestead. Convinced the South could have a vibrant ski industry, Brigham set out to find a mountain.
He found two, in fact, near Banner Elk, North Carolina. He liked the 5,236-foot summit of Sugar Mountain, a few miles south of town, but couldn’t make a deal for the land there. Instead, he purchased an option on the upper slopes of Beech Mountain, north of town and at more than 5,500 feet high. To finance the lifts and lodge, Brigham’s group sold the land to the three Robbins brothers, who had made money developing local tourist attractions. Their idea was to develop Beech real estate, along with a sister condominium resort on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Beech opened in the winter of 1967–68 and soared to the top spot in the emerging Southern ski industry. A national marketing blitz brought an upscale clientele for second homes.
Brigham felt the investment group spent more than he liked on the Virgin Islands venture. So he decamped and returned to Sugar Mountain, where he was now able to strike a deal with landowners George and Chessie MacRae. Sno-Engineering’s Sel Hannah designed the new resort, with Stein Eriksen’s endorsement. The slopes opened on December 19, 1969. Austrian instructor Erich Bindlechner ran the ski school, fresh from his previous post as assistant ski school director at Killington. In 1971, a former Kober instructor and snowmaker at Bryce named Bob Ash came on as Sugar’s mountain manager—he would later run both Beech and Sugar.
The summer of 1973 brought the OPEC oil embargo, recession and high interest rates, all but halting second-home sales. Real-estate bankruptcies followed. Brigham saw the writing on the wall and bailed again, heading to Cheat Mountain in West Virginia to launch Snowshoe Mountain.
Ash maintained that the debacle of 1973-75 gave Southern skiing an undeserved black eye. “Even during the gas crisis and the bankruptcies, the ski operations at Beech and Sugar and the others were making money,” he said. For a time, Sugar Mountain was the South’s largest ski area.
Gunther Jochl engineered
recovery at Sugar Mountain.
Sugar Mountain photo.
Gunther Jöchl
Brigham’s departure left a vacuum at Sugar, leading to bankruptcy. In 1976, the court leased the mountain to Jöchl and his Blue Knob partner Dale Stancil.
Jöchl, who held a degree in engineering from the University of Munich, solved the snowmaking, grooming and lift problems, elevating Sugar’s skiing. “It used to be unheard of to start skiing before the 15th of December,” he says. “When I came here, I said, ‘It’s gonna get cold. Let’s make snow.’” Sugar started opening in November. “Everybody thought we were nuts,” he says. “By the time they were wondering what we did, we had fantastic skiing, made some money—and got great publicity.” Eventually Jöchl could cover the entire mountain—all 125 acres—with a foot of snow in 36 hours.
In 2011, Jöchl bought out Stancil’s share to become sole owner, along with his wife, Kim, one of the U.S. Ski Team’s Schmidinger twins. Major slope expansions included a double-black diamond run homologated for FIS slalom and giant slalom events and six new lifts, among them six- and four-passenger detachable chairs.
As a young racer in Bavaria, Jöchl’s sponsor was Völkl, and he had become friends with Franz Völkl, Jr. himself. In 1981 Völkl offered Jöchl the U.S. distribution rights to the brand. Until 1995, one of the world’s premier ski brands was distributed from Banner Elk, North Carolina. Then, for two years, he imported Kneissl skis and Dachstein boots.
Powder day at Snowshoe. Snowshoe
photo.
Snowshoe: Brigham’s Final Mountain
Brigham’s new venture, Snowshoe Mountain, grew even bigger than Sugar. It consisted of three lift networks on 257 acres, topping out at 4,848 feet elevation. The west side of the ridge offers an uninterrupted 1,500 feet of steep vertical.
Snowshoe, named for its population of hares, represents that “developed-out-of-nowhere” side of Southern skiing. The resort debuted in 1974 with little lodging, and Brigham realized he couldn’t run a destination resort with nowhere to sleep. Refinancing was needed and the state helped, but Snowshoe’s growing pains continued, with bankruptcies in 1976 and again in 1985, even as the resort became the South’s largest ski area.
Between the bankruptcies Brigham again withdrew from one of his ski resort projects, developing the Euro-style Whistlepunk Village and Inn on the mountaintop. Stability arrived under coal magnate Frank Burford. Acquired by Intrawest in 1995, Snowshoe was hosting nearly a half-million skiers annually by the late ’90s. Over a handful of years beyond the turn of the century, Intrawest spent $100 million building one of its signature resort villages. In summer 2017, Snowshoe stepped up to national Ikon Pass status when it was acquired by Alterra Mountain Company.
Brigham, with long time protégé Danny Seme, moved on to another West Virginia summit, Tory Mountain, but this last resort never opened. Trees again cover its runs. With son Peter, Brigham spent his later years involved in Colorado’s Sunlight Mountain Resort. He passed away in 2008.
The Other Guys
After the early heyday of natural snow skiing in Canaan Valley, skiing came back in 1971 as the state developed Canaan Valley Ski Resort where Bob Barton’s 1955 original Weiss Knob had been located.
Adjacent Timberline ski area, with 1,000 feet of vertical, opened in 1982 and in 2019 was purchased by Indiana ski area operator Perfect North Slopes after falling on hard times. The new owners installed West Virginia’s first six-person detachable chairlift. Timberline’s two-mile Salamander Run, the region’s longest, is the only Southern slope requiring a U.S. Forest Service public land use permit.
Wintergreen, now Virginia’s biggest ski resort, opened in the winter of 1975–76 with slopes designed by Sel Hannah. Clif Taylor, originator of the graduated length method of ski instruction (GLM), was ski school director. In 1982, manager Uel Gardner, another New Englander, added the ski area’s challenging Highlands slope system, taking the vertical drop just past 1,000 feet.
Randy Johnson is an award-winning travel writer based in Banner Elk, North Carolina. His most recent book is Southern Snow, published in 2019.
Ski lift evolution is dotted with failed experiments.
(Photo above: The Mount Hood Skiway launched in 1951. The enormous weight of the buses meant the lift hauled 72 skiers per hour—when a chairlift of that era transported 1,000.)
The new high-speed Jordan 8 bubble chairlift at Sunday River, Maine, will be the fastest eight-pack in North America once it’s installed for the 2022–23 ski season. Thirty-two hundred skiers per hour will ascend at 20 feet per second, cradled in heated seats with head and foot rests.
This Usain Bolt of lifts will be the ultimate in uphill transportation, and a far cry from America’s first surface lift—a steam-powered toboggan tow built in Truckee, California, in 1910. The article, “A History of North American Ski Lifts, by Mort Lund and Kirby Gilbert (Skiing Heritage, September 2003) tells the full story of how Alex Foster’s rope tow (1932–33) was succeeded by Ernst Constam’s J-bar and T-bar (1934), and then by Jim Curran’s chairlift (1936). That article traces the story of lift designs that were successful enough to become commonplace. But what about the lifts that didn’t make the Darwinian cut?
Skiers have been transported by devices that look strange to us today, including boat tows, ski-on gondolas, jigback trams, Air Cars, Skimobiles, shotgun tows and sit-sideways chairs. There have been city buses converted to skiways, attempts at monorail lifts and a greasy chain-drive contraption that ruined more than a few ski outfits.
“Consider the trials and tribulations of lift design through the years,” says Peter Landsman, a lift supervisor at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, who started LiftBlog.com in 2015. “People are passionate about skiing. Almost as long as there have been skiers, there have been people trying to determine the best and fastest and most efficient way to get to the top.”
Ski lift engineers have done their best to make the ascent a smooth one, but it didn’t always go as planned. Here are a few of the engineering dead-ends we can charitably consider “nice tries.”
With parts salvaged from local
mine hoists, Aspen's boat tow
opened in 1938. and hauled
skers, at 10 cents a ride, until
1946. Aspen Historical Society
Ahoy, Mateys!
Before its first chairlift, Aspen skiers relied upon repurposed mining equipment. The original Boat Tow on Aspen Mountain was constructed in 1937 by members of the Aspen Ski Club and opened on January 27, 1938. It consisted of two wooden toboggans, or “boats,” each one 12 feet long by three feet wide and containing four plank seats mounted rowboat style. The boats were constructed of pine, including the runners, which had steel banding attached, according to Aspenmod.com.
The boats were connected by steel cable to rotating terminals converted from hoist rigs that had been taken from the Little Annie Mine on Aspen Mountain. The cable was guided up the mountain by wood towers. The motor was a converted Model A Ford engine.
Up to eight people could sit in a boat and be pulled up 600 feet of vertical in less than three minutes, while the empty boat slid down the other side. The fee was 10 cents a ride, 50 cents for a half-day. The boat tow lasted through December 1946, when chairlifts were deemed a higher capacity—and preferred–route uphill.
Leave the Driving to Us
At least the name was impressive: Oregon’s Mount Hood Aerial Skiway. But, in reality, it was two repurposed city buses, each using a pair of 185-horsepower gasoline engines to ascend a stationary 1.5-inch diameter cable—a technology also used in timber operations to haul logs out of the woods, according to Lindsey Benjamin, writing for the Oregon Historical Society.
In January 1951, the Mount Hood Skiway opened, climbing 3.2 miles from below Government Camp to Timberline Lodge. It was the longest lift of its kind in the world and attracted the attention of newspapers, popular magazines and newsreel producers on its preview voyage. In an August 1951 Popular Science article, Richard Neuberger described the Skiway as the “most extraordinary of busses,” scraping clouds to deposit passengers at Timberline Lodge. A 1956 newsreel breathlessly exclaimed, “It flies through the air with the greatest of ease!”
Equipped with streetcar-style seats that flipped to allow passengers to always face forward, each bus had a capacity of 36 riders. When finally hung on the cables, the buses’ behemoth weight resulted in a 5.2–miles per hour, 25-minute trip up the mountain. Each round trip thus took an hour, which meant the Skiway lifted only 72 people per hour—in an era when the typical chairlift hauled 1,000 skiers in the same time frame.
Said Bill Keil, a Timberline Lodge publicity manager during the 1950s, “The tramway crippled its way through five years of marginal operations before suspending” in 1956. By June 1959, despite repeated efforts to carry out experiments for a redesign, a liquidating committee was formed. The lower terminal building was sold in 1960 for $25,000, and Zidell Machinery and Supply Company bought the two buses, a jeep, an engine and other tram parts for $10,080.
“I guess it proved to be not the most successful lift, but it certainly looked cool,” says LiftBlog.com’s Landsman.
Attitash set up a model monorail
in 1967. It got no farther than the
base lodge. Attitash photo.
How About a Monorail?
New Hampshire was a hotbed of lift innovation, considering the Cranmore Skimobile, Wildcat’s gondola and the Cannon tramway. When Attitash opened in 1966, pitched as the “Red Carpet Ski Area,” its owners wanted a creative way to open the upper mountain.
According to the Mt. Washington Signal (December 1966), plans called for a cog monorail rising
1,800 vertical feet over a 7,600-foot run (1.4 miles). Four trains, each carrying up to 42 passengers in heated cars, would make the one-way trip in 10 minutes. While two trains unloaded and loaded at base and summit terminals, two would be en route, passing at a mid-mountain siding.
It would be the first such monorail in the world, according to the North Conway (N.H.) Reporter (Jan. 26, 1967). That month the manufacturer, Universal Design Ltd., of Cape May, New Jersey, erected a section of track adjacent to the base lodge, on which sat an articulated demonstration car with a Buck Rogers plastic-bubble roof. Photos of the train circulated in newspapers across the country in February 1967.
It wasn’t until a narrow track-line was cut all the way to the mountain’s summit that managers faced up to the difficulty of financing the project. Nor did the landlord, the U.S. Forest Service, appear eager to approve construction. Instead, a much simpler chairlift opened on the upper mountain in February 1969. In the end, the monorail was an idea better suited for Disneyland. The model car and track section were sent back to the Jersey shore.
In 1963, Park City skiers rode
mine cars three miles, then a
hoist 1800 feet to the surface.
Tunnel Your Way to the Top
Ski lift designers are nothing if not resourceful. Some look at an abandoned ore tunnel and imagine skiers happily ascending skyward.
When Park City’s last mining company developed Park City Ski Resort, its first “lift” was the Thaynes Shaft lift. In 1963, the “skier subway” opened. Skiers could board repurposed mine cars, journey three miles underground through the Spiro Tunnel (drilled in 1916) to then ride the mine elevator 1,800 vertical feet to the surface and emerge near the Thaynes double chair. Archival photos show skiers in headbands crammed underground with their pencil-skis and screw-in edges trying to make the best of a sometimes dripping-wet experience. The ordeal took 45 minutes. Though popular as a novelty, most skiers rode the train only once before heading back to the much-faster chairlifts. (For the full story, see “Spiro Tunnel,” SH, March–April 2019.)
Chain-drive "clickety-clack"
dripped oil on chic skiwear.
Mount Snow photo.
Mount Snow’s “Clickety-Clack”
Mount Snow in Vermont was way ahead of its time in ski lift design. The resort’s Air Car was right out of TV’s The Jetsons. Installed in time for the 1964–65 season, the short Carlevaro and Savio tramway lasted about 12 years, traversing from Snow Lake Lodge to the base of the mountain, according to NewEnglandSkiHistory.com.
A Mount Snow lift with greater longevity was the Mixing Bowl double chair, nicknamed the “Clickety-Clack” because it ascended an overhead track pulled by a greased chain. Mark Hettrich joked on Facebook that it “looked like a meat drying rack,” with skiers playing the part of beef jerky. Mike Gagne, also on Facebook, remembered, “When it was raining, it was unbelievable the amount of grease that was dripping down and covering us; it was quite a mess and noisy and slow. Basically, it was a conveyor belt-style ski lift.”
Skip King, former vice president of American Skiing Company, the one-time owner of Mount Snow, recalls how the lift was eventually kneecapped. “The fact that the chain needed constant lubrication is the reason it constantly dripped oil.”
The noisy lift was dismantled in 1997, when it was replaced by a surface conveyor belt considered easier for beginners to master. “Besides, our carpet lift had a cover on it like a covered bridge, which was more protective,” says National Ski Areas Association President and CEO Kelly Pawlak, who was general manager of Mount Snow from 2005 to 2017.
This is a concept utterly unsuitable for the general public, and it should have dead-ended years ago. But Portillo, Chile’s signature lifts have survived decades in use by expert skiers. Built in the 1960s by Jean Pomagalski, the original Roca Jack surface lift was designed to survive avalanches on the steep terrain it serves. It has no towers, so an avalanche passes under the cables with no damage done. The cable wheel is anchored to the rock face at the top. Five skiers ride side-by-side, hanging onto a horizontal bar and dragged by Poma platters under each butt. Poma calls this type of lift a va-et-vient (“go and come”) because as one bar goes up, the empty one comes down.
When the liftie pulls the launch cord, the tow-bar accelerates abruptly to 27 kilometers per hour (17 mph). It takes teamwork and steady nerves to ride successfully. Just don’t cross your skis or your buddy’s skis. At the top, the tow stops just as suddenly. To avoid sliding backward, the five dismounting skiers have to drop into traverse position without knocking each other over. Nonetheless, the lift does what it was designed to do, and Portillo installed three more just like it, on three more avalanche chutes.
Says former U.S. Ski Team coach John McMurtry, “It’s not exactly what you want for a learn-to-ski program.”
The Future of Uphill Transportation (or Not)
A few more recent inventions indicate that innovation in ski lift design continues unabated. The jury is still out on these.
Towpro is an electric winch on
wheels.
Who Needs a Ski Area?
Why travel on icy roads when you can put a ski area in your backyard with a Towpro Lift—a portable rope tow that weighs 400 pounds, can be put into the back of your pick-up truck or SUV, sets up in an hour (with help) and runs off a 240-volt electrical plug (same as a clothes dryer or electrical stove). The return unit can be mounted to a tree, and the system comes with a rope spliced to a length of your choice.
“One enterprising Vermonter cut down a few trees and set the rope tow up on a hill on his 30-acre property: no parking, no reservations, no lines, no social distancing. He bought a generator at Home Depot to power it. He slows it down for his five-year-old daughter,” writes ski journalist Tamsin Venn, a member of the North American Snowsports Journalists Association.
Cost is about $8,845, which, considering lift ticket prices of about $230 per day at some areas, will pay for itself in a little more than a month. Of course, your backyard isn’t groomed by a PistenBully.
Powered Skiing
Even our friends in the Nordic ski world could use a lift now and then. Another weird ride worth watching is the SkiZee Woodsrunner, “the four-stroke leader in so-called powered skiing.” It’s essentially a baby snowmobile—small enough to fit in a car trunk—that pushes you from behind like an outboard motor. For $4,990 you can zip along a frozen lake or rolling hillside at 25 miles per hour.
Zoa, a handheld winch, rides on
your back for the ski down.
Backcountry DIY Tow
Not to be outdone is the Zoe Engineering Zoa PL1, the portable rope tow for the backcountry that fits in a backpack. First you skin up, tie a line to a fixed object or snow anchor, lay 1,000 feet of parachute cord downhill, remove the 10.5-lb. battery-powered winch from your backpack, ride the parachute cord back up, then descend. Repeat as long as the battery—and your legs—hold out. The patent-pending rope tow system promises more laps with less work. It’s still in the beta stage, and prices will start at $1,056.
Clearly, wherever there are skiers, and the rules of gravity continue to apply, there will be creative inventors ready to figure out new ways to go up just so they—and we—can come right back down again.
Ride the Limo in the Sky
If you had the means, you could charter a Gulfstream IV jet to get to your favorite ski resort. Once there, so long as the destination was Killington, Vermont, you could have also chartered your own gondola cabin with music, leather seats and cup holders.
For $1500, you could rent a
luxury gondola car, but on each
run you'd have to wait for it to
come back around.
Killington photo.
The 1993 high-speed Skyeship gondola that Skiing History wrote about in its January–February 2021 issue was state of the art at the time, with heating and a different modern art graphic on the exterior of each cabin—which was nicknamed by some wags “FART” for “flying art.” The idea was that for $1,500 daily that particular gondola would be yours for the day.
They meant well.
“The tricked-out Skyeship stayed on the line. They couldn’t pull it and set it aside for you to finish your run,” says Ken Beaulieu, director of the Killington News Bureau at the time.
“You’d have to time your run exactly and make sure you were down in time to pick it up again as it came around the bullwheel. Needless to say, that program didn’t last long. There wasn’t much of a market for it.”
ISHA board member Jeff Blumenfeld is president of the North American Snowsports Journalists Association (NASJA.org).
In November 1924, a relatively unknown writer named Ernest Hemingway came to Austria’s Montafon Valley at the suggestion of a friend. Hemingway was living in Paris at the time, on a shoestring, and the friend assured him that this cozy, snowy Alpine valley near the Swiss border was an affordable paradise. Hemingway clearly agreed. With his wife and young son, he stayed the entire winter, and then the next.
(Photo above: Left to right, Sara Murphy, Hemingway, John Dos Passos and Gerald Murphy, touring above Schruns. Hemingway sought solitude in order to finish his breakthrough novel, The Sun Also Rises.)
Nearly a century later, an even-less-known writer and her husband came to the Montafon at the suggestion of a friend, seeking a similar escape. As it did then, the valley delivered.
Winter sports clubs started here in 1906.
My friend Mo discovered the Montafon about a decade ago, after an expensive and unsatisfying ski vacation at a big Western resort. Since then, he’s been back—winter and summer—at least once every year, with some or all of his family. After years of hearing his sales pitches, and eager for some European travel, my husband and I committed to the journey.
It was not my first visit to the Montafon. I had vague memories of racing a World Cup there in 1992, and, after the two-hour drive from Zurich, I recognized the cobblestoned Kirchplatz of Schruns. The 39-kilometer-long (23.4 miles) Montafon Valley—bound on the north by the Verwall Alps and by the Silvretta and Rätikon mountain ranges to the south—extends from the outskirts of Bludenz past Schruns, the valley’s main village, to the tiny village at the Partenen, where we stayed.
The Vorarlberg (literally “before Arlberg”) is a part of Austria that’s often overlooked by skiers who head to the better-known resorts on the eastern side of the Arlberg Tunnel in Tirol. Even to Austrians, the Vorarlberg often feels more Swiss than Austrian, and the heavy, musical dialect reflects that. After World War I, the region even tried unsuccessfully to become part of Switzerland.
For some history of skiing in the valley, I stopped by the Montafoner Museum in Schruns, where historian and author Dr. Andreas Brugger is an archivist and resident expert. Within moments of our meeting, he delved into the extensive rows of floor-to-ceiling archives and retrieved full documentation of my participation in the 1992 World Cup on the Golmer Joch, which was the last major international Alpine competition in the valley.
FIRST SKIING
Winter sports clubs started in the Montafon in 1906, first in Schruns and two months later in adjacent Tschagguns (the area is also referred to as Schruns-Tschagguns). Though initially the main activity was toboganning, in 1910 the area hosted the first Vorarlberg state championships in downhill skiing on the Golmer Joch, on the northwestern end of the valley.
Ski development stopped during World War I, though soldiers still trained to ski in the valley. During the interwar period, skiing boomed, as it did throughout the Alps. Starting in 1919, as villages throughout the valley established their own winter sports clubs, skiing overtook tobogganing in popularity. During this period, Hemingway installed himself at the Hotel Taube for $2 a day, writing in the early mornings before climbing up the mountains with sealskins on the bottom of his skis to race downhill on runs like the Silvretta, the Versettla and the Kapell, then drinking kirsch schnapps and playing poker into the evening.
The area hosted the Vorarlberg state championships again in 1933, with competitions in downhill skiing, cross-country skiing and jumping; meanwhile, ski jumps were built in
Tschagguns. Just as ski-sport development was taking off, World War II again stalled it.
Old smuggling routes now serve as ski
touring trails, crossing into Switzerland.
Stefan Kothner, Montafon Skiturismus
Gargellen, tucked up another valley in the Montafon’s southwest area, was a well-established smugglers’ path. The (Swiss) Silvretta and (Austrian) Rätikon ranges, explained Brugger, “were a mountain border between war and peace twice.” Beginning in the 18th century, locals maintained a vigorous smuggling trade via rough trails over the ridge to Switzerland, which had neither a road nor an official border crossing. During World War II, locals helped shuttle people escaping Nazi persecution, including Jews, political refugees and draft dodgers. At the end of the war, Nazis allegedly escaped via the same route. Those smuggling trails are now summer hiking routes, and in winter Gargellen is a popular jumping-off point for cross-border ski tours to Switzerland.
Skiing enjoyed its second heyday after the war. Schruns-Tschagguns again hosted the Vorarlberg state championships in 1946 and the first Austrian post-war Alpine and Nordic championships in 1947. For these events local clubs built Vorarlberg’s first chairlift, and a new combined ski jump that hosted Austria’s first night event in the sport.
During this time the area was occupied by the French army and under strict food rations. Racers, officials and press were treated to extra food procured on the black market, earning the area the reputation as Austria’s “Golden West.” By 1949, in order to cooperate on building facilities and hosting events, the various clubs started associating as the Ski Club Montafon, Events included the “Two Piste” races in the 1950s, where men and women sped down a pair of descents—the Kapell, from Hochjoch to Schruns, and the Hartmann, from Grabs to Tschagguns.
By 1960, Ski Club Montafon included all nine clubs from valley towns: Schruns, Tschagguns, Vandans, St. Gallenkirch, Gaschurn, Partenen and Bartholomäberg as well as the side valleys of Silbertal to the north and Gargellen to the south. A successful era of cross-country skiing also started in Gaschurn, and by 1977 locals had garnered 10 national titles.
From 1963 to ’83, Ski Club Montafon drew top women to the Montafon Gold Key Races. Starting in 1967, the Gold Key was a regular stop on the women’s World Cup circuit. When a blizzard struck in 1983, 18 teams left town in spite of the jury’s decision to hold the downhill. The local club suffered a major financial loss and ended the Gold Key series. The area hosted one final Women’s World Cup in 1992, where hometown hero and 1988 Olympic gold medalist Anita Wachter competed on the course named for her.
Silvretta-Montafon is one of the 10 largest ski
areas in Austria. Stefan Kothner photo.
Savoring the Slopes
Our friend Mo wanted to show us all of the Montafon, and we tried our best to comply, falling into the easy routine of a European skiing vacation. Each day started with the dreamy Austrian buffet breakfast at the Hotel Sonne, complete with fresh semmels, cheeses, meats, muesli, yogurt, fruit and carafes of strong coffee and hot milk. From there we headed across the street to catch a quick bus ride down to Gaschurn, where we could hop on the Versettla Bahn up the western side of the valley or, just down the road, St. Gallenkirch and the ultra-modern Silvretta complex, where gondolas went up the Valisera to the west or the Hochjoch to the east. At the Silvretta base are retail and rental shops and a ski testing center, plus a market hall with restaurants and cafés serving local specialties. Beneath it is the largest e-charging garage in Vorarlberg. The development is just one example of the Montafon’s resort investments, aimed at modernizing rather than expanding.
The Silvretta Nova side, above St. Gallenkirch and Gaschurn, features a massive variety of steep frontside and backside terrain, while the expansive Hochjoch, above Schruns and Silbertal, includes the Montafon Snow Park, whch hosts the annual World Cup snowboard events. From the top of the Hochjoch, we skied back to Schruns via the Hochjoch Totale, a 12-kilometer (7.2 miles ), 1,700-meter (5,600 feet) descent. If you hit the gas, the run feels like the ultimate citizen super-G.
In 2008 Silvretta Nova and Hochjoch merged as the Silvretta Montafon, including Golm and Gargellen, to become one of Austria’s 10 largest ski areas. With a weekly ticket that works out to some $50 a day, it doesn’t take much wind in the face to get your money’s worth. By the time we stopped for lunch at one of the modern mountain-top lodges or, even better, gathered around the stammtisch (the table for local regulars) at a cozy hut for coffee and schnapps, homemade soup and apfel strudel, we were usually ready to call it a day. Later on, dinner at the hotel, included in the room rate, was dependably delicious.
A highlight for any skier is the Silvretta Ski Safari. It starts from Partnenen with a tram ride up the Vermunt Bahn, then a white-knuckle bus ride through two tunnels to the Bielerhöhe Pass, which connects Vorarlberg to Tirol. (In summer this area is accessible by the Silvretta-Hochalpenstraße, home of an annual vintage car rally. From Partenen the road rises 700 meters [2,300 feet] over three kilometers [1.8 miles] with 25 hairpin turns, then mellows to its high point on the Silvretta reservoir.) From the pass, the ski safari follows the gentle descent of the summer road; at the bottom, snowcats pull skiers across a snowfield to Galtür. The route then loops back to Partenen.
We were disappointed to find the trek closed due to avalanche hazard, so we based out of the Berggasthof Piz Buin. Smack on the border of Tirol, this is one of three hotels/huts at the Bielerhöhe Pass. Hemingway roomed in one of the others, the rustic Madlenerhaus, now a base for the German Alpine Club. From there, we skinned up a less hazardous exposure to glimpse the Piz Buin and surrounding 10,000-foot peaks that make this the largest ski touring area in Vorarlberg.
It’s easy see how a soon-to-be-famous writer found the fortitude to rewrite The Sun Also Rises, or call up the vivid imagery in the Snows of Kilimanjaro, or capture the emotion of an era gone by in A Moveable Feast. Hemingway may have moved on to fame and Gstaad, but some of us will be happy to get right back here to the Montafon.
Regular contributor Edith Thys Morgan wrote about Spider Sabich in the March-April issue.
In January, 1903, the St Anton Ski Club held trial
And so the first "general" race was held in 1904. The long-distance race was an uphill-downhill slog over the top of Galzig in deep snow. Yannick Rumler/Tourist Board photos
Arlberg ski school, 1921. St Anton Tourist Board/Rumler
Hannes Schneider and Arnold Lunn.
Slopes near the village were crowded by 1930, though skiers still climbed for their turns.
After World War I, Austria was impoverished. St Anton got its Galzigbahn in 1937, three years after trams went up in France and Switzerland.
Local hero Karl Schranz won World Cup titles in 1969 and 1970.
St Anton hosts the Alpine World Championships, 1970
Clocktower still stands guard downtown.
