Learning to Ski at Laax
When water freezes the resultant material tends to be slippery stuff. We all know that, but perhaps what no one will ever be able to explain is why we have become so addicted to sports that allow us to slide, often perilously, over ice or snow.
In the past and for most non-alpine people aged over 50, skiing was something only the very rich could do. Something so fantastically expensive and beyond the realms of possibility for most folk, that only royalty or film stars could even dream of binding long thin planks to their feet in some pricey alpine resort. And when they did, a great many came back with broken legs.
All of which is a long way of saying that, until my mid-50s I’d never been skiing. Or rather, hadn’t, until when one of my friends from Swiss Tourism invited me to give it a try.
“I can’t believe you’ve never skied!” she said. “But you travel on press trips all over the place – you have done years – and you are telling me you’ve never tried the world’s favourite winter sport?”
I did feel rather left-out and inferior. It was no good my telling this young woman about West Country penury when I was a boy and all that nonsense – she wasn’t even born when I passed 20 and probably couldn’t conceive of a Europe where large numbers of folk could never afford to visit the mountains.
There was another factor which I had to mention to her: “I am tall and (apart from an increasing beer belly) thin. I have long thin legs which I am convinced could break easily – and, as I write about walks as part of my job, a broken leg would be a very bad career move.”
She assured me modern skiing didn’t produce too many broken legs - and the next thing I knew I was swanning about in one of the best combined ski and snowboarding resorts in the world.
For that is the way some ski-journalists I know describe Laax, especially when talking about the varied terrains that have been devised for snowboard enthusiasts in particular. I was to discover all this for myself during a long and extremely enjoyable (although at times arduous) weekend learning how to hurtle down mountains on board two sharp pointed planks.
How did I get on? Well, pretty good I’d say, but in a totally uncontrolled and lucky kind of way. More of that later, but where and what is Laax?
Basically it’s an area in the high mountains of the Graubunden canton in eastern Switzerland – a handy place to reach if you’ve flown in to Zurich on a regular Swiss Air flight from London City Airport. An hour’s stunning train ride past lakes and mountains, followed by half an hour in a local bus, and you are there – high up in the snow zone.
The original village of Laax Dorf still exists just outside the big new and extremely busy complex at the lift-base which is surrounded by hotels and shopping and eating complexes. This is the bit that’s now known as Laax, of which the recently completed Rocksresort development is a part.
One of the beauties of staying here is that you are only a few steps from the big lift that takes you on a truly glorious 15 minute journey up to the high snow slopes – and my newfound ski-buddies tell me that is a very important factor when it comes to a holiday based on hurtling down mountains.
The ultra-modern resort with its hip interior design and architecture built from local rock might disappoint those looking for the traditional alpine world of wooden chalets and chequered tablecloths. However, it will excite if you have an eye for well executed modern design. The Rockresort is to log cabins what Porsche is to the VW Beetle.
I liked the place. I liked its modernism and its luxury. And I liked the short 50-metre walk from my hotel to the underground locker area where skiers are fitted with their gear - because it lies just beneath the main ski-lift.
The gear and its fitting is a story in itself – especially for a beginner. The staff weigh and measure you, then hand out an impressive pair of modern skis. Then they torture you. By which I mean they measure the size of your feet before clamping them into the sort of boots gangsters use when they want to throw an enemy into a harbour in the hopes he will sink.
If ski-boots are not made of concrete, they could be.
“That’s too tight!” I cried to the guy fitting mine.
“There meant to be,” he shrugged.
Actually, he was wrong. So much pain was I in the next morning, that my ski-instructor – a calm and affable Englishman called Simon - told me to go back and get another pair. When I did the same fitter from the night before said: “Why have you got these? They’re a size too small.”
In truth, the replacements weren’t much better. If I have one negative thing to say about skiing it is that the tight clamp-on boots are so painful they can spoil the whole thing. I suspect that I was either badly advised, or had on the wrong type of thick socks. At any rate, I still had a ring of black bruises around my upper ankle areas two weeks after I left Switzerland – which skiing friends say should not have happened.
Anyway, upwards and onwards to the slopes…
On our first morning there was a blizzard – not that this mattered at all because we were all kitted-up and concentrating hard. I was with a group of other journalists – all in their 20s, and most of them had never skied before either. So I was oldest by a quarter of a century – and I was also the only one who never fell over, which is a fact I wear with pride.
For us greenhorns, Simon set in motion a basic “ski-lift”, which really was nothing more than a loop of thick soft rope running around a winch. By grabbing the rope at the bottom of the nursery-slope you could, if you were strong enough (and it took a lot of strength) be towed some 300 metres uphill.
Within three hours we were all more or less getting down this slope – in fact I was flying down it – a fact which impressed Simon because I was able to turn and stay upright.
“You are a natural,” he beamed.
I protested and told him the truth: “I haven’t got the faintest idea what I’m doing. I’m just belting down because that’s what the skis are making me do – and I’m staying upright because I’m too scared to fall off.”
He waved this aside. But it was the truth. I was hopeless at stopping effectively and, if anyone had cut in front of me, I would not have been able to avoid them. Long graceful turns at speed, I could do – tight fast turns, I most certainly could not.
Anyway, the ever cheerful Simon beamed and encouraged. So I did a lot of vaguely controlled hurtling. And so it went on all weekend.
I will admit that I am none the wiser now on even basic points of skiing let alone more advanced stuff, than I was after that first hour. But, by some miracle – more by accident (if I dare use that word) than design – I did not once come to grief.
Teaching an older person to ski in a weekend was always going to be a tall order – but I’ll say this: I left feeling certain that if I’d spent four or five days up there I would have cracked it. Unless those damned boots had cracked me first.
Because of them, it was a relief to stop skiing. And then, realising the blizzard had been replaced by bright sunshine, I literally yelped for joy. Being high up in snow-covered mountains in sunshine is one of the greatest treats known to man. It is stunning. Sensational.
I spent the rest of the day belting about on the various ski-lifts so that I could take as many photographs as I could. They might not be good compared to mountain landscapes taken by others, but the photographs I took are among my best shots in 30 years of travel journalism.
And my photographic wanderings weren’t over on the first day – 24 hours later a small group of us went on an eight mile walk through snowbound forests on the other side of the village, and it was a truly magical, uplifting experience. Hardly anyone else was out in the silent woods – and eventually we came to a viewing platform dangling, quite literally, over a 1000 abyss.
Deep below the young Rhine was doing what it has been doing for the past 10,000 years – cutting itself a gorge to pass through what is said to be the remains of Europe’s biggest ever landslide. Indeed, the whole of the Laax-Flims snow-zone is there partly thanks to this massive prehistoric parting of mountain – and the higgledy-piggledy forest we’d just walked through was the most obvious evidence that this entire valley was once a mass of debris.
Walking through snow is tiring – and it was some relief that we regained the excellent Hotel Signina at Laax to enjoy a Turkish bath and a swim.
And here’s another non-skiing highlight - if I had a favourite moment up there in the mountains it was dining high up in the pine forests above the resort, eating endless amounts of molten cheese washed down by equally large quantities of excellent Swiss wine. And here’s the magic moment – we were each handed a toboggan so that we could each sledge the main piste’s final mile or two in the moonlight.
Talk about hurtling… I loved every crazy exhilarating minute of it.
And when I looked back up at the steep drop we’d just sledged down the thought did strike me that perhaps old journalists prefer to do their hurtling sitting down.
FACT FILE
There are regular return flights daily with Swiss Air from London to Zurich.
Martin stayed at Signina Hotel, Laax: www.signinahotel.com
For further information, visit www.graubuenden.ch
