DISCOVER 101 OUT-OF-THIS-WORLD SKI EXPERIENCES
Arnie Wilson discovers a resort that even he hasn’t visited in Ultimate Skiing Adventures, the latest book written by regular Ski+board contributor, Alf Alderson
Skiing can be full of surprises. When I was toying recently with skiing in Greece, I discovered to my surprise that Greece claims to have more mountains than any other European country. True or false? Who knows?
In Ultimate Ski Adventures, Alf Alderson successfully spreads the net wide – a “good global spread” covering 101 “epic experience” resorts - including well-established resorts in the Alps and Rockies and ski experiences “in lesser-known mountain ranges, from the un-named peaks of Iceland’s north coast to the volcanoes of Kamchatka.”
“If you’re just getting into this marvellous sport” writes Alderson, “then your first blue run will probably and quite rightly be an amazing experience…whereas if you’ve been at it for decades it may require a helicopter drop on some remote Kamchatkan volcano for you to describe your ski experience as amazing.”
The book spans ski areas from Andorra and Scotland to Argentina and Siberia with one joker in the pack - to be revealed later! “Hopefully a few of them will inspire you to dust down your skis and hit the slopes,” writes Alderson. “Because when all is said and done, reading about skiing is one thing, but doing it – well, that’s amazing.”
A sample spread of Alf Alderson’s book
In addition to listing key stats about resorts, Alderson uncovers intriguing facts about them. For example, Val d’Isère’s celebrated snow record is based partly on “a quirk of mountain geography”. He quotes Cedric Bonnevie, who’s in charge of piste preparation. “We don’t just get our snowfall from the Atlantic. Our proximity to the Italian frontier allows us to benefit from some exceptionally heavy and highly localised snowfalls… This phenomenon, known as the retour d’est […] dumps copious quantities of snow on the French side of the Alpine chain. Invariably, Val d’Isère is the only French resort that benefits from this effect.”
As those who read Alderson’s book right to the final entry - Looking to the Future - will discover, there’s a subtle reason for his inclusion of 101 resorts. It’s not a trick or trap, as such, but no one – not a single human – has been to “resort” 101, let alone skied there. Yet.
Here are some clues about it:
Highest peak: 21,230 metres. (No that’s not a misprint, it really is metres and not feet!)
Average angle of descent: 5 degrees. (Compare that with what’s claimed to be Austria’s steepest slope – Mayrhofen’s Harakiri, or Piste 34: 38 degrees)
In a top-to-bottom run, a beginner would be close to being an expert by the time they arrived at the bottom station’s après-ski pub which, says Alderson, would be called The Mars Bar.
Oh, and you’d have to walk up or skin up. There are no lifts. The name of the “resort”? Olympus Mons, Mars.
In the meantime, you’ll have to make do with the 6,000 resorts in the 75 countries here on earth!
Ultimate Skiing Adventures by Alf Alderson is published by Fernhurst £20