Handbook to Skiing the Alps [antikvár]

EUROPE IN PERSPECTIVE The Alps stretch across Europe from the fringes of the French Riviera, with the Mediterranean below, to eastern Italy and Yugoslavia not far from the Adriatic. They are home to people calling themselves Austrian, French, German, Italian, Swiss and Yugoslav—and draw skiers from the world over. A ski vacation in the Alps is two vacations in one: a ski vacation and a trip to Europe. For some North Americans, skiing the Alps is a once-in-a-lifetime experience—a pilgrimage, like Mecca is to the Moslems. For others, it is the mountain range to which they return winter after winter—with the regularity of migrating swallows. The skiing is neither better nor worse on one side of the Atlantic than the other. It is different. Skiing the Alps means getting into a cable car with a multi-national, multi-lingual group, rising swiftly above the timber line and disembarking in a wide, white world of endless snow and peaks that stretch to the horizon. There are no ski mountains as magnificent as the Alps, no on-mountain dining more civilized and no skiing more exciting. There are beginner slopes as tame as tilted table tops, and there are radical chutes and near-vertical couloirs verging on the unskiable. There are busy slopes, crawling with legions of skiers, and there are isolated snowfields and lush powder pockets out of sight and earshot of anyone—or anything—else. Lunch, and perhaps a nap on a sun terrace, is a traditional ritual in the Alps—for these sun-kissed mountains are where Europeans flee from cities that are cold, rainy and gray all winter Some skiers are fiercely loyal to one country, one resort or even one hotel. Others like to shop around and find a variety of experiences. The resorts run the gamut from unspoiled villages that still wear the mantle of a simpler, more agrarian time to the most sophisticated international resorts, where it is possible to rub shoulders with the rich, the famous and the titled. By and large, there are basically four kinds of Alpine resorts—and they don't necessarily follow national boundaries. "Tyrolean"-style resorts are found not only in that Austrian state, but in others such as Vorarlberg and Salzburg, too, as well as in the German Alps and Italy's Alto Adige (which was historically Austrian and is still a bilingual Italian-German area also