Skiing is Fun

One was a city-based week where I never stayed at a resort. One was a proper British package holiday, and one was a week at a place that’s iconic in the freeride world. Innsbruck, La Plagne, Engelberg.

Innsbruck is one of my favorite cities. It's a real city, not just a ski town, with a population of 132,000 and the Nordkette rising directly above the north bank of the river. It also happens to have a bounty of great skiing within a stones throw by public transit. We stayed near the train station and picked a different mountain every day: Axamer Lizum, Stubai Glacier, and a trip over to St. Anton.

The SKI plus CITY Pass covers 12 areas across the Innsbruck and Stubai regions with a single card, and it includes the ski buses, which run from town out to the base stations every morning. You get on a bus, and an hour later you're on a lift. Axamer Lizum is maybe 30 minutes from the city. Stubai Glacier is about an hour.

Each of the mountains had its own character. Axamer Lizum feels like a backyard hill, albeit with some pretty fun looking off-piste that was too sun-baked to ski while we were there. A spot that Innsbruck locals turn to for a quick morning or afternoon ski. The resort has decent variety, but it’s a bit small if you’re just skiing pistes. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the Hoadl-Haus at the top, one of the more stunning mountain lodges I've been in.

Stubai Glacier is higher, colder, and bigger with the kind of terrain that stays in decent shape when the lower resorts are struggling. The top station sits at 3,210 meters, and the whole ski area lives between about 2,300 meters and the summit, which means no trees and no tree line. The whole resort sits in a big bowl. It can be great, but also frustrating if a bit of weather moves in and visibility drops to zero. You get around on a handful of T-bars on the glacier itself (the ice moves too much for chairlifts).

St. Anton is St. Anton. Catch a train west out of Innsbruck in the morning and you're at one of the most iconic resorts in Europe. It's an easy commute: we caught an 8:00 train, got there around 9, skied basically bell-to-bell and caught the 5pm train back to Innsbruck for dinner. There’s a huge variety of piste and off-piste terrain, and the amount of connected Ski Arlberg connected resorts is huge. You could easily stay around St Anton for a week and not get bored, although the price tag for accommodations might be a bit different. We’ll definitely have to come back with better off-piste conditions.

The thing that sticks with me about Innsbruck isn't necessarily any single day of skiing. It's the overall vibe. The train station is consistently full of people with skis and mountaineering packs. You see people biking to the station with skis, ropes, and ice axes over their back. In some ways it reminds me of Boulder but Boulder doesn’t have twelve lift-served ski areas within an hour that are all accessible by public transit.

La Plagne pulls somewhere north of 2.5 million visitors a season, in large part because it has the size and infrastructure to handle so many people. When you combine it with Les Arcs it becomes Paradiski, one of the largest linked ski areas in the world with 425 kilometers of pistes.

We went on a proper British package holiday, which was a first for me. It was all organized by a friend in London and we joined a group of 32 — some people we knew, some we didn’t, but everyone was connected in some way. The package holiday is a kind of institution; they run Saturday to Saturday, with flights into Geneva, coach transfer to the resort, and a week's lift pass, all bundled together. Total cost for the week, not including flights (which aren’t very expensive in Europe) was around a thousand dollars a person.

The amount of tourism infrastructure that is purely designed around this style of trip is insane. Every operator runs Saturday-to-Saturday rotations, which turns Geneva airport into a kind of controlled riot on changeover day. Groups stand around waiting for the last of their friends to land before boarding buses. Buses stack up outside arrivals. Traffic between Geneva and the Tarentaise valley is bumper to bumper for hours. It's not the most relaxing. But once you're on the resort, you don't need to think about any of it again until the next Saturday.

We ended up with mostly bluebird weather, which was good for the pistes, and less so for the off-piste. Days weren't really about charging, but that was part of the point. A lot of the week was just skiing with friends: get going in the morning, pick an area to explore, stop when somebody needed a coffee. I learned that “elevenses” (a short break taken at around 11:00 am for a drink or a snack) is a real thing and not just something Hobbits do. Not gonna be mad about a short break for an espresso or a vin chaud. Raging bell-to-bell is fun but so is spending six hours on the hill without any of it feeling like a sprint.

A lot of people in our group were happy to take long mountaintop lunches, and more power to them. We tended toward the "cheese, bread, butter, and keep skiing" camp, albeit with the occasional elevenses stop thrown in. Mid-week a storm rolled through and dropped enough snow to refresh the off-piste terrain. We spent a day lapping the Combe off the top of the resort, and lines that would have been gone by 10am in the US were soft all day. Part of the reason for that it is that European skiers tend to stay on-piste more, and part of it is just scale.

Engelberg is different. The train pulls in from Lucerne and drops you at a small station in the middle of a small Swiss village toward the end of the valley. There’s a thousand-year-old Benedictine monastery on one end, a handful of restaurants and ski shops along the main road, and above it all the Titlis massif.

I wrote about Engelberg and the Ski Lodge in the summer a couple years back more focused on trail running, and finally made it back in the winter. I'd go back next week if I could. Titlis has less than a quarter of the pistes of La Plagne. But it has a 2,000-meter vertical drop and some of the best lift-accessed off-piste terrain in the Alps. The "Big Five" freeride routes (Laub, Galtiberg, Steinberg, Sulz, Steintäli) are legendary for a reason.

I wouldn't recommend Engelberg as a first choice for for beginners or people who prefer pistes. The piste map is small and less experienced skiers might get bored quickly. But if you want to ski off-piste and you want to be surrounded by people who really, really love skiing, there are probably few better spots.

Day one, run one was a trip up the gondola to the top of the resort at Klein Titlis, where we dropped into the Steinberg, 4,000 ft of glacier skiing running down to Trübsee. And that pretty much set the tone. We spent a few days romping around the resort and then as spring temps started to turn the snow into mashed potatoes, we got off the resort and did a couple of tours on nearby Wissberg and Bannalp with friends.

I caught up with Julian Carr over a few beers in the Ski Lodge bar; he’d flown over from the US chasing a late-season storm. (Julian's world-record 210-foot cliff jump was off Jochpass, right here in Engelberg). Two-time Freeride World Tour champ Hedvig Wessel was around while we were there and I met the owner of the The Mountaineer, an outdoor shop in Keene, NY over breakfast, about to head out on the Urner Haute Route. These kinds of things are not uncommon here. You ski all day come back to the lodge at 4 or 5, stash your skis and join the other locals, pros, and visitors in the Ski Lodge backyard all stoked about their day. What makes Engelberg special is not the apres, the spa, not package vacations or on-mountain dining. It’s the people, and the skiing. You come for the skiing. You leave thinking about the skiing (and whether you should move there).

There's no takeaway or conclusion here, These were three different trips, and they were all great. (If someone asked me which was best, I'd say Engelberg, but that’s beside the point). The main thing is that skiing is fun. Skiing a big resort is fun, skiing with friends is fun, and being surrounded by really good skiers is fun. We do the rest of it, the writing about the industry, policy, climate data, etc, because that fun (skiing, trail running, hiking, fishing, hunting, whatever it may be) is worth protecting.

I’ve been running on minimal gear while living in London, since the rest of my stuff is in a storage unit in Boulder. So, for the gear nerds:

Stellar Equipment Pro Shell/Bibs, Peak Performance Freelight, an Arc’teryx wind shell (10y old, no idea what). Rab baselayers. Smartwool socks.

Salomon MTN Lab helmet, Sweet Protection Connor goggles, K2 Mindbender 130 Boa, Salomon Echo skis w/ATK Freeraider 15, Raide 40L backpack.

The Stellar kit is bomber, not much more to say there. I run pretty warm so the minimal Peak Alpha Direct and light jacket layering has been perfect for me, not only for skiing but longer trail days. The Echo isn’t bad for a one-ski quiver but a heavier/narrower 50/50 will be significantly better for Europe most of the time. The Mindbenders are good, but not great as a hybrid, and I haven’t experienced any of the QA issues some folks report. I have the v1 of the Raide backpack and love it (also spotted it on a bunch of folks in Engelberg).