Ski Blog: News and Views from the slopes.

SuperSki Weeks For 2007/2008 Are Coming Soon!

It’s that time of year again. Time to think about the where, when and why not of the coming ski season. SkiEurope is kicking off another great year by releasing an earlybird preview of their SuperSki Weeks.

SuperSki Weeks are posted online for public consumption on September 1, 2007. Registered subscribers of the SkiEurope Report newsletter will be e-mailed an earlybird special preview on August 20, 2007.

Subscribe to the SkiEurope Report Here.

Prices for the 2007/2008 ski season start from $650 person (Innsbruck, Austria 6 nights, double occupancy) and include: roundtrip air, 6 or 7 nights hotel accomodation, buffet breakfast, transfer as specified and local taxes and service charges in Europe.

Best ski trip values for the 2007/2008 ski season include: Salzburg, Austria from $850, Interlaken, Switzerland from $919 person, Garmisch, Germany from $939 person, Chamonix, France from $989 person and Cortina d’ampezzo, Italy from $1,095 person. Be prepared to act quickly. Ski vacation vailability is limited and at these prices some ski weeks sell out quickly!

Ski Safari Stretching at Both Ends (Kitzbuhel, Austria)

Years ago, the Kitzbühel inaugurated the “Ski Safari”, a neat tour of the entire ski area from Pass Thurn to Aschau, marked by jolly elephant signs. Even reasonable intermediates could notch up 50,000 vertical feet, a record envied by heli-skiers. This year, the tour has been stretched at both ends. A new link has been built at the south joining the Kitzbühel lift system with Mittersill in the P valley. Of greater importance, greater terrain-wise, is the KiWest gondola which rises across the valley from Ashau upward into the Westendorf ski lift system. Westendorf is part of the SkiWelt Wilder Kaiser, already a vast interlinked ski area. Possibilities almost without limit.

If It’s Noon, It Must be Cervinia!

People often ask how they can ski several different countries during their short visit to Europe. Surprisingly, the easiest way may be to ski from one country to another during a single ski day. Here are some of the possibilities: Ischgl (Austria) to Samnaun (Switzerland); Zermatt (Switzerland) to Cervinia (Italy); Courmayeur (Italy) to Chamonix (France); Champéry (Switzerland) to Morzine (France).
Ready to ski accross the boarders?

What is the Biggest or Best Ski Area in The World?

There’s an ongoing competition to claim top spot as the world’s biggest ski area. At the peak is France’s totally lift-connected Les Trois Vallées including the well-known resorts of Courchevel, Méribel, Val Thorens, and Brides-les-Bains. Even larger, but requiring some hops by bus, is Italy’s Dolomiti Superski region. New to the fray this year, is Kitzbühel.

Any of these areas is vast compared with even the largest North American resort and simply impossible to fully explore in a typical visit.
Ready to book your trip there? www.ski-europe.com

Twin-tips? Wrong picture?

It's a been a while since the last post and I hope you enjoyed the summer months. Believe it or not today is September 1...and it is time to gear up and get ready for the next winter season. While doing some research on the latest snow trends, I found out the newest "cool" skis to have are twin-tips. When I first heard about them, I tried to visualize how they would look and immediately asked myself why one would need twin-tips (at front side) of his/her skis. Well, if you made the same assumption...you're off-track. Twin-tips means that skis have tips on both ends of the skis.
If you're puzzled, believe me, you're not the only one...because youngsters use them to ski downhill...but backwards! 

Something is certainly wrong in this picture as I remember being taught to always look downhill ..not uphill while skiing.

Hurray...for ski racing fans!

A recent article posted on CNN's Website announced that the International Ski Federation (FIS) may introduce a new cup event, the combined World Cup, in the 2006/07 winter ski season.
Let's hope an additional cup event will boost audience's interest for ski racing in North America and make ski cup events as popular as they are in the Alpine world.

If it’s not one thing, it’s another …

Resort managers, fearing a disastrous year due to scanty snowfall, have apparently indulged the snow gods with some particularly effective exhortations because a major winter storm has hit the continent. Snow has fallen in huge amounts, over a meter in places. Rejoice, tourists!  Skiing is once again possible.

But all this great snow comes with problems. What would be the fun of paradise if you could waltz in there without a travel nightmare or two to recount around the après-ski fireside? The airport at Geneva was closed for eight hours on January 23, the longest shutdown they have experienced in twenty years. Why? They gave some lame excuse about braking being impossible for planes. Where’s the fun in that? And trains in France that many tourists rely on to get to Alpine resorts were held up in depots for hours due to the danger of rock falls. Yikes! And snow has piled so high in Val d’Isère that children have been warned not to play outside near the house, due to the danger of mini-avalanches from the roof.

All this snow would seem good news for skiers, once they arrive, anyway, but the snowstorm has caused the cancellation of the Hahnenkamm, the biggest racing event in the ski year. Volunteers in Kitzbühel, Austria, worked feverishly to clear runs so the competition could commence, but the weather got the better of them. Presumably the athletes are heartbroken, but one guesses the spectators are partying like maniacs, anyway. Prost!       

Every move he makes, every breath he takes, they’ll be watching him . . .

The world is now officially out of control, or maybe it’s just the people there. It seems that Sting, former front man for the Police and current zillionaire-tantric-solo-act-man-of-the-world, spent a small fortune on a family outing to the posh Italian ski resort of Cortina d’Ampezzo. He booked a week at the Cristallo Hotel, but, according to Britain’s Daily Mirror, he and his entourage left after two days. Apparently ski tourists now consider picture phones to be as necessary for life at a mountain resort as a new set of Rossignols or that perfect Patagonia pullover, and are not bashful about using them.  Constant ogling might get old for celebrities, but having countless camera phones shoved into his face must have been more than Sting could abide. Were the tourists really more obnoxious than the paparazzi who normally follow him around?

Either way, you have to feel sorry for everyone involved. The Sumners (or whatever name they travel under) were forced to flee their expensive vacation, and the camera phone toting tourists now have to live with the knowledge that they are responsible for making Sting’s life a living hell.  The management at the Cristallo finds the whole thing perplexing, since legions of the glitterati stay there without any trouble all the time. Or is the camera phone the invention that will finally bring down life as we know it?

For those of you wondering, the Sting party high-tailed it to Venice, where the only skiing one can do involves watercraft. But one has to ask: are there no camera phones there?    

Let it Snow

Despite worries of a snow-less holiday on the European slopes, resorts celebrated the snow that fell like a Christmas gift from above. In the weeks leading up to the holidays, skiers were canceling reservations and staffs in major resorts like Chamonix, Mèribel, and Courchevel were holding their breath. Just in time for Santa Claus, the snow arrived. No need to cancel Christmas – up to a meter of snow fell on grateful resorts.

So Christmas was saved – this time. It seems that the fluctuating climate is no friend to Alpine skiers and boarders. Winter has come later in the past few years shortening the European ski season and making it difficult for resorts under 1,800 meters (5,850 feet) to be snowsure by the end of December. A spokesman for the Institute of Snow and Avalanche Research in Davos, Switzerland, reported that the drop in the level of snow at resorts below 1,500 meters (4,875 feet) in the Swiss Alps between the years of 1981 and 2000 was noteworthy. Read more about this in an article by Hugo Miller in the Bloomberg News.

Many large resorts have invested heavily in snowmaking equipment over the last few years which goes a long way in reducing the stress for both resorts and skiers but smaller resorts don’t always have the finances to keep up. But this time the natural white stuff finally fell on small and large resorts alike making a happy ending for everyone (well, except for those who had to navigate the icy roads to get there).