04
evidence of the culture
Puttin’ on the Moritz
In Europe,
skiing is more
he terrace in front of Restorant Alpetta, a rustic stone mountain hut with its name blazoned on a slab of fir, is bustling with talk, laughter and the savory scents of grilling meat. Waiters squeeze past chairs and heavy wooden benches, ferrying plates of dried meats and raclette, grilled bratwurst, deer carpaccio, rösti covered with a fried egg, plates of regional cheeses, and many, many bottles of wine and beer. Above the crowded terrace, a sheer granite wall rises in a vast amphitheater to the 11,000-foot summit of Switzerland’s Corvatsch mountain. In the early morning, I stood on the top—deposited by a ski tram that had swept me nearly 5,000 feet up from its base station—staring across the deep gash of the Engadine valley and the stunning Bernina Alps on the far side, blanketed in deep snow and punctuated by plummeting glaciers between knife-ridged arêtes. Across a frozen lake deep on the valley floor lay storied St. Moritz, the crown jewel of all ski towns and birthplace of winter sports, hardly discernible in this expanse of space. Inside the restaurant, the horns of Alpine game hang on walls beside brass cowbells dangling from thick leather collars. The proprietor, Dorigo Riz à Porta, greets me with a smile, his weathered face and squinched eyes evidence of a passion for spending long summer days wandering through these mountains of his birth. “So, it’s not like skiing in North America, is it?” he asks. He hands me a glass of prune schnapps. “Our approach is different here in the Alps. For us, a big part of skiing is spending time with friends and family, sitting on a deck under a warm sun high on a mountain, eating food and drinking wine or beer of the region, and soaking in the beauty of the mountains. ‘Gemütlichkeit,’ we call it. It is a way of being: warmth and friendship, humor, coziness, enjoyment of life.” Skiing the Alps is an eye-opener, the kind of cultural expe-
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By Roger Toll rience that forces you to weigh your own assumptions. With a bent for action and results, American skiers are more inclined to get on the mountain early and rack up vertical feet on their high-tech chronometers than to spend an hour or two at lunch. With a leisurely attitude to mountain holidays, European skiers tend to be more relaxed and social on the mountain, stopping to drink a glass of Jägertee or Glühwein and tell stories. Ask them what was the best part of the day, and they will invariably praise lunch. It almost feels as if skiing is an excuse for a restful, convivial holiday, not the end in itself. And in St. Moritz, there’s no shortage of conviviality. About 125 miles from Zürich, it is arguably the grandest of Swiss ski resorts, boasting five five-star hotels and a pedigree earned over more than a century and a half of hospitality. The Hotel Kulm started humbly in the 1850s, a practical man’s response to the arrival of British travelers out to discover the charms of an Alpine summer. In 1864, the hotel’s owner persuaded his guests to visit during the winter, and they enjoyed it so much that they stayed until the spring, skating and curling on the lake and sledding on the town’s streets. In fact, the “bobsleigh” was invented in St. Moritz, and the famous Cresta Toboggan Run was built a few years later. It took another 50 years, and the impetus of the first official Winter Olympic
European skiers tend to be more relaxed and social, stopping to drink a glass of Jägertee or Glühwein and tell stories.
photo by FAN travelstock/Alamy
t
convivial than competitive.
: evidence of the culture Games in 1928 in St. Moritz, for skiing to extend beyond the sphere of a handful of daredevils and become a sport
loved by a growing crowd. Its popularity got another boost from Switzerland’s first ski school, founded in St. Moritz in 1929. Over the next half-century, royalty, aristocrats and arrivistes descended on St. Moritz, their winter playground. Alpine and cross-country skiing, skating, bobsledding, sleigh rides, horse races on the frozen lake, tennis, squash, and nat-
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76 Sky february 2008
“Evidence of the Culture” offers intriguing examples of the cultural opportunities to be enjoyed at destinations served by Delta and its SkyTeam partners. To visit this month’s featured destination, St. Moritz, Switzerland, flights can be booked to Zürich on Delta or on SkyTeam partners Aeroflot Russian Airlines, Air France, KLM, Alitalia, Continental Airlines, CSA Czech Airlines and Korean Air. For more information about the SkyTeam travel network, turn to page 114 or visit www.skyteam.com. ural mineral baths filled the days; grand soirees in the hotels, the nights. Even in a more democratic age, the tradition continues, and the same venerable hotels are jammed with black-tie- or gown-clad regulars who reserve their rooms years in advance, season after season. The rows of exclusive shops on the town’s sinuous streets rival those of any major city, and high-priced restaurants are plentiful. Skiing the three mountains surrounding the town in the relative calm at the end of January, I am grandly oblivious to the social ado during the peaks of the winter season. Instead, I make the most of the mountains with three friends, skiing hard, exploring the expansive terrain, enjoying the sunny weather and ample meals, and discovering once again the pleasures of being in the Alps in winter. Ted Heck, the Pennsylvania-based editor of the Blue Book of European Ski Resorts and a committed Europhile, returns to St. Moritz every few years. “As elsewhere in Europe, the ambience is real, not fabricated,” he tells me as we ride up a lift together. “I love the villages, the carved wood balconies and painted murals on the walls. I love the many accents and languages you hear and the friendly people you meet. There is a camaraderie built on skiing that is simply part of the national culture. And besides, the beer is better than back home.” People have been living in the Alps for millennia. It is their backyard, and they are comfortable in it. After working my way up a series of lifts past raw granite walls, I see grandmothers dressed in
black, pulling wood sleds loaded with grandchildren across the top of a slope, as much at ease in this raw environment as they would be watching over their charges in a municipal park. There is always joy and surprise when skiing in Europe, I find, perhaps because I’m from a different culture. Even though my favorite snow falls in the Rockies, and I like the orderly, buttoned-up operation of a North American resort, take me to Europe and I become a different person. Shall we stop for a glass of wine? But of course, though I seldom touch alcohol when skiing in the United States. A twohour lunch on a sunny deck? You betcha, though you won’t find me stopping for more than 30 minutes back home. There is nothing that equals the silly fun of après-ski in Europe, where suddenly everyone is singing together, clinking glasses, stomping in ski boots to the music, smiling like fools. Try that in the States and people will slowly slink away from you. And when it comes to food, there is simply no comparison.
l
ate in the day, the sun a few degrees above the saw-toothed ridge across the valley, my friends and I traverse high across the mountain toward a steep run through forests—barely marked and hard to find, but popular with locals. It was one of Dorigo Riz à Porta’s recommendations. “It will drop you in the outskirts of St. Moritz, not at the bottom of our Corvatsch gondola where crowds will be waiting for buses back to town,” he said. “Besides, on a sunny day like this, the mountains just before sunset are magnifico.” Like cairns of piled stone marking the route home, couples and small groups of friends sit on boulders along the way, eking out a few moments more of the ebbing day, many with a bottle of wine in hand. “Here, have some,” says a man from Zürich, sitting in the snow with two friends 20 feet from where we’ve stopped to look out over the valley. We join them in the snow and exchange the usual stumbling pleasantries of passing strangers thrown together, the bond of our sport and the
love of mountains proving stronger genial grin, “To life!” “To Gemütlichkeit!” I answer. And than the gulf of our different cultures and languages. we’re off, skiing the last two miles home As the sun drops below the distant together. ridge, we stand and begin clicking into our skis, arranging poles and zipping up In his hometown of Park City, Utah, Sky jackets for the steep descent through Contributing Editor Roger Toll misses the forest. We shake hands, and one the rösti and raclette of lunch in the Alps, of the men, holding up the bottle and along with the local wines and spectacuProject7 11/30/06 9:05 AM Page 1 emptying it of its last drops, says with a lar views.
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february 2008
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