Skiing/boarding at Verbier

Last Saturday we finally decided to try one of the ski hills in the area. We chose Verbier, since some friends have a chalet up there and it was decided we'd try and meet them there after skiing.

It wasn't a sunny day, so our pictures aren't nearly as eye-catching as on other outings. It is sunny here more often than not... maybe that's why Geneva (#2) beat out Vancouver (#3) in the 2006 Mercer Quality of Living Survey of the world's most liveable cities. Zurich is #1, but since we haven't been there yet, we have yet to see what all the fuss is about. We'll be passing through Zurich on our way to Austria this week so perhaps we'll see what Geneva is taking a backseat to.

Getting to the base town of Verbier takes about three hours, although it's only about 90km from Geneva as the crow flies. But then, even the crow wouldn't fly too straight because of the mountains in the way. Unless of course it's the variety of crow that can drill straight through rock. But I digress. The map below shows the problem: Lake Geneva (Geneva is at its western tip) and France (you can see the snaky border running through the lake) are both in the way. Cutting straight through France isn't an option because there's not much transportation infrastructure in that remote area of France. Although not labelled, Verbier is at the green marker at the bottom right corner of the map. You may put down your pencils; geography lesson is over.



Here's um... us. If I had longer arms, I'd be able to snap a decent selves-portrait for once.


The resort of Verbier... a zillion chalets with plenty of room for more. Slopes and mountains are no obstacle for Swiss construction. Most buildings are made of exposed wood, the way one would expect chalets to look. It looks very nice, very alpine... perhaps we should have taken a close-up. Oh well.


Some scenery. The mountains opposite us looked very inviting, especially since we didn't have a whole lot of snow on ours. Many runs were covered with brown snow, from snow being mixed with dirt. Other runs were white but with patches of exposed rock or ground. Others were blue, due to some chemical meant to work some sort of weather magic. Others were terribly icy, which made my always-crowd-pleasing downhill tumbles quite painful. But we did find some that were good, with a fair bit of powder. And when there is ample snow to be found, it is a pure joy to board in (sorry, I don't speak for skiers) since it isn't wet or heavy.


These pictures were taken from the gondola that took us from the base town to the resort area. We could have taken a bus that would have had to manoeuver up the snaky road seen below, but the gondola was much faster. Plus it was paid for in our travel package.


As you can imagine, we were a little concerned about the lack of snow as we ascended. Things didn't improve until a few climbs (gondolas, chairs) further.


It was an alright day, once we found some runs with sufficient snow cover. We saw a St. Bernard or two on the mountain, possibly more for tourism than for delivering free rum to stranded mountaineers (wasn't that their specialty?).

Lift tickets are actually swipe cards that you use to go through turnstiles when accessing the areas to go on the lifts. These turnstiles occur at every lift. Perhaps the low point was around 11:55. We made our way down a run and proceeded to the turnstiles. Swipe! Hmm no luck. When neither of us managed to get through, we figured the worst. We had taken the wrong combination of runs and had ended up in a *different* resort town, whose chairs up the mountain weren't part of the Verbier system. So we went to the ticket person and asked how the system dealt with navigationally-challenged folks such as ourselves. We had the honour of buying a separate lift pass for this particular ski hill. Fortunately, Verbier clients get a major discount because they've already bought a pass, so it would only cost us 11 francs each if we would wait till noon to buy. We did so and skedaddled.

We never did meet up with the friends who had a chalet there. We had neglected to take a phone number or address, and we hadn't set up a meeting point. So home we went.