EUROPEAN SKI EXPERIENCES
By HOWARD BIRD
FTER four winters of ski-ing in lVlontreal, ,,·here one can get out on
Mount Royal every night of the week, and spend week-ends in the
Laurentians, or on the trail from Camp Fortune to Ottawa, the prospect of living in Southern England, where the snow, if any, is only two
inches of slush, did not seem promising from a winter sports point of view.
While you can play golf practically all winter, I lived in hope that some
of my business trips around the Continent would lead me near some of the
fam ous ski-ing places.
A
T YP I CA L K ORSE S KI CO UN TRY
So in February last, when I had to go to Mi lan, I left London with my
ski-ing th ings, and took my ticket from Paris to Milan via St. Moritz.
There had been very Ii ttle snow in Svvi tzerland, and people had been
prolonging their Swiss holidays in hopes of getting some better sb-ing, so
t hat it was only through the assistance of an influential friend that I was
a ble to get into one of the St. Moritz hotels.
I could only spend a week-end there, but I stretched it a day or so .
My previous knowledge of St. Mori tz had consisted of the usual published photographs, but I found that outside the people whose sole object
see med to be to display novel winter sports costumes and get into the papers,
th e re was a large crowd of men and women (mostly British) who went there
for t h e ski-ing only . They disappeared early every morning and came back
late a t night.
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The first sight of the up-and -down topography fairly took mv breath
away, a nd I spent the first afternoon trying to find my ski legs on- some of
the ve ry small hills around the Lake.
With the help of a guide, I started out Sunday morning to see some of
the hills h e called easy ones. My previous big hill experience h a d been t h e
long hill at Shawbridge, which quite frankly scared me to dea th, a nd even
standing on top of it m ade my k nees rattle .
The guide took me up a funicular at the back of the town, a nd then we
climbed up a path for about one a nd a h alf miles till I thought we must be
on the top of the world. I was sure he could n ot get me down alive.
\Ve were about one-qua rter of the way up a rather small mountain at
the back of the village. The guide showed m e the course for the annual race
at S t . Moritz. He expla ined that it was generally used after a heavy fall of
snow, a nd n o words of mine could possibly describe h ow it would look to an
amateur m ountain ee r with a small amount of experience on skis. It started
about two miles up the mountain from us. How anyone could come down
a live is beyo nd m e, although appa rently they do, right down the steepest
side of the mountain, over gulli es, pa ths, a nd towards the foot, a big, sweeping
cur\"e, and down a street in to the village.
T h e slide down from where we were was all right after I got sta rted. I
had a su ccession of beautiful runs for several miles and mv enthusiasm fo r
Swiss ski -ing just about boiled over.
'
On the last day I took a n other trip to the Val de Fain. This run is typica l
of the way you spend your days in St. Moritz.
We too], a train on the Bernina Railway to abo ut its highest point, and
then started up a valley, and climbed for seve ral hours until we reached a
hut at the head of the vallev about lunch time. I saw some oth er enthusiasts
go ing up the sid e of the valley and they appea red to be faint dots in the distance and about a mile above me. We rested at this hut and h ad our lunch
(which the guide had carried ) and then started down.
There was only abou t twelve inch es of snow, so the rocks were not very
well covered, and it was a bit dangerous. The slope, h oweve r, was ra ther
g ra dual, with s teep d ips here and there. We looked d ow n the valley at a
gla cier; it looked about 'a mile away, but was, according to memory, about
t hi rty. The scen ery, of cou rse, was marvellous, and we were way above the
tree line. I think 'we must have slid for about fifteen miles before we finallv
reached t he end of our slid e, and h a d a bite to eat at a small Swiss inn, afte;wa rds taking the train h ome and rea ching the hotel in time for dinne r.
On the way up a nd down t his v alley on the sides of the mounta ins I saw
ski tracks t h at took my breath away, although I did n ot see them mad e.
If you take about three times the he ight of the big hill a t Shawbridge,
a nd a ll as steep as the steep es t pa rt, yo u can picture the side of that m ountain ,
a nd there were dozens of tracks coming down it in lette r S's. There were
none coming d own straight. I do not think there is a m a n alive could d o it.
Mv words cannot describe what a wonderful day that was, but there are
a great many trips that take longe,-, and which i~clude steeper and more
difficult and they say m ore beautiful runs .
The only way to ski there is to go out in the morning, climb to the top
of something, and then slide down after lunch as I did . I have seen from the
distance some of the glaciers th a t make up these runs. Y ou can't believe what
t hey are like until you have seen them. It takes a week o r two's training to
get in cond ition for t hem, a nd I on ly hope that some time I can spend long
e nough to really get into condition a n d take the best r uris.
Ski-ing has been in trod uced into Switzerland within the life-time of the
old er guides, but they have taken to it m arvellously, and though I had often
read about them, I fo und fo r myself that they were a wonderful crowd of men.
I m entioned to some of them that I h ad known A. Maurer, who came
from the Engadine also, but from another town, Dayos, I believe, and they
had all met him in various competitions.
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Practically all of the people who really go in for ski-ing in Switzerland
are English, and there are two or three English ski-ing associa tions tha t foster
the sport. They have a wonderful system of instruction and test, which bring-s
on a novice to a position where he or she can soon take the most difficult runs .
One of these associations runs several hotels, both in the Bernese Oberland and the Engadine, and you can make all your arrangements right in
London for a holiday of any length you want in Swi tzerland, and be assured
that everything will be perfect. Moreover, the price is extraordinarily reason able, so reasonable in fact that I hope to be able to taI{e advantage of it this
winter and take a ski vacation instead of the usual summer one .
After I visi ted Milan I had to go to Berlin, and left my ski things there,
as it seemed possible that later on before the winter was finished I might get
an oppo r tunity to ski in some of the German mountains, where the sport has
taken hold considerably.
INN AT FINSE
As it happened, however, I had to go to Copenhagen, Stockholm and
Oslo later, and as I went via Berlin T was able to pick up my ski things and
take them on with me, hoping that I might get an opportunity for some skiing . It was two weeks after Easter when I arrived in Oslo. It had been a
particularly snowless winter. and there was, of course, at that time no snow
around the southern part of Norway, bu t my arrangemen ts were such tha t
I had to spend a week-end around Oslo, and on the recommenda tion of some
Norwegians, I spent it in Finse.
Finse is approximately the highest poin t of the railroad behveen Oslo and
Bergen. The Lake is about 4,000 feet above the sea, and the mountains round
it go up to 6,000 or 7,000 feet. There is nothing there but the station and
the hotel. It is above the tree line and the mountains are more rounded, and
really more suited to ski-ing than those in Switzerland . During the winter
ski-ing there is very dangerous, as every winter many people get lost and
frozen, due to the sudden violen t blizzards. Spring ski-ing, however, is generally perfect, and Easter is the big time.
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Right across the lake from the hotel is the Hardanger Jokelen, which is a
magnificent round-topped and ice-capped mountain. For all the three or fom
days I was there the sun was brilliant and terribly hot. The snow was that
beautiful spring snow which has an absolutely even friction; your skis do not
sink in more than half an inch but yet you get a firm grip, and it is almost
impossible to fall. The sun was so bright that it was necessary to wear goggles,
and most advisable to wear a cerise coloured veil too to protect your face.
I scorned the veil, but I certainly shan't next time, as my face didn't recover
from the sunburn for a month.
I found the hotel very full, about half of the people being English and
the other half Norwegian, and incidentally the King of Norway himself was
there. He is a fine ski man, and every day did from twenty to thirty miles
on his skis.
I have never in my life seen such magnificent ski-ing, and in such perfect
weather and snow conditions, but I was ,so soft that I nearly killed myself
trying to get in as many long trips as possible,
You can get any sort of a slope you want there, from the most gentle
one to those that will frighten even the best. If you can imagine sliding anywhere from 2 to 8 miles continuously, sweeping down steep slopes and again
running down long and gentle ones, over perfect snow and in brilliant sunshine, you can imagine what ski-ing there was like.
Fortunately, one does not have to compare ski-ing in Finse with ski-ing
in Switzerland. Finse, so they Jell me, is no fit place for a human being in
the winter, and in Switzerland after Easter it is necessary, I understand, to
go to the very high altitudes to get any snow, and one misses altogether the
winter sports life of living in a snow-covered community.
The above is the impression of a ski-ing novice, and I think would be
somewhat the impression of the average amateur on his first visit to Switzerland and Norway,
A very am~sing situation is the respective opinion of each other of the
Swiss and Norwegian ski-er.
I am not judging, and would not attempt to do so, but I have heard
each speak of the other, and think it is interesting. The Swiss admits that
ski-ing came from Norway, and says that the Norwegian can slide down the
hills and get there wonderfully well, but that wh en it comes to style and form
and cross-country racing in the S"viss mountains, the Swiss claim superiority,
. and their style is certainly beautifully graceful. One person who posed as
an authority in Switzerland, said that a Norwegian loved to get a nice icy
road about six miles long and slide down it at sixty miles an hour.
Norwegians, on the other hand, seem inclined to show a good deal of
contempt for style in ski-ing. They come down a hill in every position that
the experts or the books on the subject say you should not, and will come down
the most terrific hills any way they please, and they claim there was never
an important competition in the world that the Norwegians haven't won .
Also, I have heard it said in Norway that the form developed in Switzerland
by the guides and others is designed for teaching purposes, and should be
scorned by any good ski-er.
Between the two schools I am no judge. I only know that there are
wonderful places in each country to ski.
The thing, however, that has struck me most forcibly is the number of
English ski-ers in both Switzerland and Norway. Those with little money
stay at the cheaper places, but they, the British, are the ones-men, women
and children-wh o are out taking long trips and practicing hard, and many
of them a re wonderful ski-ers, as we know. If in Canada and parts of the
United States they did not h ave snow at their doors, how much ski-ing do
you think would be done? And yet thousands of British j ourney hundreds
of miles for a week or perhaps two weeks' ski-ing every winter.
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