Great Swiss Skiing in Leukerbad
Leukerbad's scenic slopes (Gerry Wingenbach)
I want to tell you about Leukerbad.
Last Sunday I boarded a Swiss International Air Lines flight out of Chicago bound for Zurich. Nine hours later I was riding one of those set-your-watch-by Swiss trains rolling through Switzerland’s heroic scenery to the rugged Valais region, home to this cartoonishly magnificent country’s highest concentration of 13,000-foot summits.
The European Alps horseshoe their way around Switzerland, Austria, France, and Italy. But it is here, in Switzerland, where most of my best European ski days have been.
I fetched up in wildly scenic Leukerbad, a storybook 500-year-old museum piece of a village at the foot of an aerial tramway. For a skier or 'boarder with a yen for adventure, life doesn’t get much richer than this.
Leukerbad is Switzerland’s best-known spa town. The village dates back to the 13th century, the first inns arrived during the 15th century, and the bath-warm thermal waters that gurgle from the mountains’ depths have been here forever. Goethe, Picasso, and even Mark Twain boasted about this place. And in the past few decades, the Swiss have been flocking here to bathe in the waters.
But they also come to ski and snowboard. The slopes are ideal for families. Back home in Park City we’d call these blue and green runs. You can keep an eye on the kids. The vertical drops tumble 4,000 feet, which is comparable to Jackson Hole.
Yesterday, my Swiss friend Gilles Rusca, a top-shelf 'boarder, donned skis and guided me around the seemingly endless runs where I was reminded that it’s the legs and not technology that make the skier. (Gilles fine-tuned his skills at summer 'boarding camps at Whistler.) The conditions were spring-like, with a mix of hard pack and corn-like snow. I enjoyed the skiing, the extraordinary see-forever views, and a to-die-for plate of traditional rahmschnitzel served in a bucolic mountain hut. If love for freeriding Leukerbad was snow, Gilles' love would blanket the slopes with bottomless powder. It was the kind of day that makes a year of grinding it out all worthwhile.
But that was yesterday.
In the middle of the night a storm blew in. Snow started to fall and the roar of avalanches somewhere up in the surrounding Alps arrived before breakfast. Today there will be no cable car grinding its way up the mountain. The apple-cheeked children of Leukerbad will stay on the low-rising bunny hill this morning.
But a winter vacation in Switzerland involves much more than skiing.
This morning, after one of those incomparable Swiss breakfasts that come with almost every hotel stay (no need to rush off and catch a gondola that wasn’t rising), I rented snowshoes for a walk that proved zen-like in its beauty and simplicity. And this afternoon, in some nostalgic appreciation for my Canadian father, I hooked up with a polyglot group of village-sequestered skiers on the town’s ice rink for an impromptu curling match. Who knew curling was so much fun?
Now it is that golden hour, not yet day and not yet night, when the Swiss gather for a soak in the thermal waters. Tonight’s dinner will be fondue, or raclette, served with incomparable Valais wines. Maybe tomorrow I’ll head down the high-walled track to Grindelwald in the Bernese Oberland. But wait. There’s a patch of blue sky in the distance and just as surely as day follows night, tomorrow’s skiing will be nothing but powder, and something to write home about.
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