Traveling down a winding road, enormous peaks rise up, forming a beautiful fortress. Pine trees speckle the bottom of the mountains like little green dresses. The snow-capped peaks are a flawless white, with patches of rocky gray adding depth and texture. The mountains layer each other, one on top of the other for as far as the eye can see.
For winter break in February of 2025, my family embarked on a trip that we had been planning for years: to go skiing in the Alps. My parents are avid skiers and nearly every winter we take to the mountains of New York or Vermont.
As with any trip abroad, I experienced dozens of culture shocks, both related and not related to skiing.
In general, the people on the slopes were more experienced. There were very few snowboarders, and nearly everyone was on skis, unlike the typical mix of activity on the mountain.
While in the United States the slopes are narrow and relatively short, with large stretches of trees separating runs, here they are wide and vast. Nearly every surface can be skied on, depending on how daring you are feeling that day. Even the steepest peaks have markings from people who carried their equipment up the perilous cliffs and skied down.
Large groomed slopes provide the opportunity for a smooth and speedy run. On the outskirts, one can go down narrower paths of untended show, often with moguls, necessitating more turns and increasing the difficulty.
In contrast to the common use of artificial snow in the United States, the snow–at least on the more northern parts–was all natural, with not a single snow-making machine in sight. On top of that, the weather was perfect for the four days I skied. It was sunny with blue skies, peppered by only a few thin clouds. Temperatures stayed around freezing until the last day, when they rose even higher.
Furthermore, the Alps attract a multitude of different nationalities, and a plethora of languages and dialects could be heard in any space. There was, of course, a lot of German being spoken, but I also heard Italian, some Slavic languages, and quite a few British accents.
Mountain top ski lodges are not plastic tables and fast food, but sit-down restaurants with elegant wooden carvings and decadent meals. You can dine high in the mountains with the same elegant experience as below in the resort.
In the towns themselves, there were many things to get used to. For example, my family wanted to go out for dinner one night and drove to a dozen restaurants that were not able to seat us because we needed reservations. Even restaurants in the middle of the slopes required reservations days in advance.
Of course, most of our trip (over eight hours a day) was on the mountain.
The first lift at the bottom of the mountain immediately takes you into the fortress of the Alps. Mountains with snowy peaks surround you from all sides. We began in the Warth resort but moved along from slope to slope to the other eight mountains. Instead of skiing down and riding the same lift up to the same slope, we hopscotched from slope to slope, adding an alluring feel of horizontal movement.
On our second day, we decided to traverse the entire collection of mountains, totaling a journey of eighty-five kilometers. Every slope had a different majestic view. There is something truly intoxicating about journeying on skies. It’s not just taking a lift and going down to the same place, but traveling across mountains to a different destination each time. One feels less stationary.
The third day we visited an installation called Skyspace by artist James Turrell. In a corner of the mountain, in the middle of the ski slopes, was a dome buried in the snow with a hole opening up a small fraction of the sky to observers below. In a circle, we looked up into the sky, unobstructed by buildings or mountains.
When not skiing, we opted to stay in small family owned bed and breakfasts in the town of Steeg, rather than on the grounds of the mountain resorts. Firstly, it was much cheaper, but it also made for a more homely and cultural experience.
For two mornings we ate a traditional breakfast spread with bread, jam, cheeses, meat cuts, and various spreads. We washed it down with coffee, tea, and orange juice.
For the other half of the trip, we stayed on a bed and breakfast located on a farm. A black, brown, and white splotched dog named Lily guarded the place in a little house on the porch. Directly next to the wooden living spaces was a stable with dozens of cows.
The town of Steeg was a great place for walking and exploring. We stopped at a store that sold all kinds of cheeses and sausages. They displayed sausage of all shapes, colors, and sizes next to golden and milky white blocks of cheese. The smell of fermentation was overpowering, but if you pushed through, your reward was creamy ice cream sold in the back of the store.
Along the roads and slopes there were level groomed zones for cross country skiing. I stuck to downhill skiing, but ran along the paths in the late afternoon.
On the fourth day we skied in a second resort called Zillertal (ten minutes outside of the farm bed and breakfast we stayed in) in the town of Jenbach. Like the first, gigantic white mountains encircled each slope, wowing skiers with their beauty.
To get to the first lift of the mountain, you need to take a large gondola. The ride, which takes over fifteen minutes, lets you slowly ascend the mountain as the view of green trails morphs into white slopes.
As a result of the long ride up, the only way to exit the mountain (besides taking the gondola back down) is through one long slope, which was without a doubt the greatest ski run of my life. At the end of the day, when the sun was already beginning to crawl back behind the mountains, I joined the mass of skiers making their way down.
It must have been twenty minutes of winding down the slope, moving past all sorts of characters. A man in a pink jumpsuit blasted out German music while a group of five professionally dressed skiers took turns accelerating down rapidly and making intricate jumps. Ever so slowly the village below got bigger and bigger, until I stopped at the bottom of the mountain.
My whole time, I could not help comparing this trip to my years skiing in the United States, especially now as a recently established duopoly has forever altered that experience.
In the United States there are two corporate companies that have recently monopolized the ski industry. In nearly all of North America, ski resorts are owned by one of two companies: Epic or Ikon.
The Epic Pass costs $909 (early-bird) with access to eighty ski areas while the Ikon Pass costs $1,159 (early-bird) with access to fifty-five areas across the globe.
It is basically economically impossible to justify buying single-day or half-day passes rather than the year-pass. People who can afford to go skiing around nine times a year are getting a bargain. For those whom the activity is a one-in-a-year adventure, the prices have outrageously skyrocketed to over 200 for a single lift ticket.
Even for the monthly or even weekly skiers who would be saving money with the pass, everything else at the resorts have exorbitantly increased in price. Costs for housing accommodations, parking, food, ski-school, and gear have all soared.
In Austria, away from this duo-monopoly, the act of skiing itself was much less expensive. For example, I was able to get a 10:30 to 4 p.m. ticket on the spot for around fifty dollars. Afterwards, four of us were able to eat a full meal for seventy dollars.
For domestic Austrian skiers, the winter sport is more accessible and affordable in a way that it could never be with this U.S. duopoly. Single day skiing is nearly impossible while meals and rentals have soared in price. Capitalism strikes again.
Remembering the sparkling mountains and winding ski slopes, it feels impossible that such institutions could own such colossal entities. Yet, back home in the United States, Epic and Ikon are latching onto the skiing experience, making it so only the wealthy can enjoy a day on the slopes.
The snow-capped peaks are a flawless white, with patches of rocky gray adding depth and texture. The mountains layer each other, one on top of the other for as far as the eye can see.