Added: 12/14/2005 |
Alps - new levels of skill and enjoyment.Searching for the ski vacation in Alps you'll find hundreds of special offers and enournous choice of places worth of staying. Especially popular are accomondations in Italian, Austrean and French Alps.
Italy is considered to be very good choice for a ski vacation in the Alps. Italians are happy, friendly, polite and laid back and don't make a contest out of the lift lines. Specialists advice to stay and ski Moena and Pozza di Fassa in Val di Fassa, in the Dolomites region, which also includes Cortina d'Ampezzo. The ski pass is good for the entire region and offers more skiing than in all of western Canada. On the other end of the Italian Alps is the Aosta valley, which includes Courmayeur under Mont Blanc, where you can ski over to Chamonix France and Cervinia (Breuil) under the Matterhorn, where you can ski over to Zermatt Switzerland and back. Because it's the highest ski area in the Alps, it's a great destination for early and late season skiing.
France is very nice for an Alps ski vacations. Although a great deal of the accommodation in the newer resorts is in rather unattractive high-rise buildings, the good news is that many of the newer areas offer small, relatively inexpensive efficiency units with kitchenettes and other facilities which are ideal for families or small or large groups. Val Disere/Tignes is a mixture of both the older and newer types of Alpine village and offers a great variety of challenging on- and off-piste skiing but is not really the best place for novices. An area almost unknown outside of France is Risoul in the Haute Alpes. You can ski over to Vars and back on the same lift pass. Although most of the skiers and snowboarders there are French families, you'll also find skiers from Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Austria not only has great skiing, but unquestionably the best apres-ski anywhere. The "tea dance" (usually at the "Post" hotel) at many of the resorts is a great place to meet people and the parties all over the town can go on way past the witching hour. St. Anton, Lech, Zurs and the other nearby resorts are very sociable as well as offering some real skiing challenges. Schruns and the nearby valley resorts are best visited in mid-winter, while my favorite Austrian ski area, Soelden in the Oetztal valley even has skiing on the glacier in the summer.
Europe's Alps certainly are big where it counts for skiers, but they're small enough for comfort. What matters most to a skier is vertical drop, the difference in altitude between the highest lift-served point and the bottom of the ski run, in Europe usually the village. Big verticals mean long runs, people widely spread out over the mountain, uncrowded lifts, and overall a better ratio between time on the lift and time on the run.
The snow on the ground is powdery, fluffy well into spring. Packed powder prevails on the groomed runs, deep powder off-piste. East coast skiers may want to detune their skis a bit before going (so they don't have to surreptitiously rub the edges on some rock or concrete in Europe). Overly sharp edges catch easily in the softer stuff of the Alps. Western skiers can count on just a touch more humidity in the air and in the snow than they would find under champagne conditions. Temperatures in the Alps are relatively mild.
You certainly don't have to be a super skier to enjoy a vacation in the European Alps. Go as a non-skier with just an interest; go as a wobbly beginner; or go as an intermediate with a few tricks left to learn.
Europe has plenty of suitable terrain to give less-than-perfect skiers a super vacation and to keep them very satisfied. The Europeans have so much experience in making skiers out of just plain people, and better skiers out of those who have had some exposure to the sport, that they can certainly guide you, too, to new levels of skill and enjoyment.
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