“To get to the powder, you rode the cable railway to the summit and skied down the back of the mountain to a village as far as 12km away and then climbed on a train to ride back up to the cable railway and stand in line again.”
In 1953 I was hosted by both the Swiss and Austrian tourist bureaus on my first trip to Europe. All I had to do was get to New York and carry my camera everywhere and expose a lot of 16mm film. It was a long drive in my panel delivery truck from Los Angeles to New York on a two-lane highway. The interstate had not yet been built.
The two largest resorts in Switzerland were Davos and St. Moritz. Almost all of the hotels back then were on south-facing slopes because when they were built in the 1800s when the only known cure for tuberculosis was high-altitude and lots of sunshine. As a result, these hotels/sanitarium’s had hallways that were wide enough to push a bed out of the room, down the hallway and onto the balcony in the fresh air.
Even when the resorts started catering to skiers, many of them only had one bathroom per floor so you had to make an appointment with the maid to use the bathtub. One of the luxuries that these hotels furnished was to polish your ski boots every night so people put them out in the hallway. The hall porter would pick them up, take them somewhere and put a brilliant shine on them. He kept track of them by chalking the guest’s room number on the bottom of the boot. There have always been pranksters who would change the boots to another room after erasing the numbers on the bottom. I still remember the luxury of down comforters it seemed like they were 2-feet thick and weighed almost nothing. The mattresses, however, were lumpy as a sack of potatoes.
I was able to get some great photographs of dozens of people stretched out on lawn chairs, spending their days being bronzed by staring at the sun with their eyes shut.
The chairlift invention had not yet arrived in Europe. (Remember the chairlift was invented in a railroad yard in Omaha, Neb., by the Union Pacific railroad for the then-new ski area in Sun Valley, Idaho.)
My foreign language skills were limited to excuse me, hello, goodbye and can I take a movie of you since you’re such a good skier? I had that last phrase written in French and German on a 3 x 5 cards in my rucksack because I couldn’t memorize them. Cable railways were the primary ski lift in both St. Moritz and Davos.
In those days, you could find a small hotel and get a nice room with two meals a day for less than $8 per day. Prices varied with the proximity to the cable railway and I remember lift lines for those cable railways that were as long as two or more hours. To get to the powder, you rode the cable railway to the summit and skied down the back of the mountain to a village as far as 12km away and then climbed on a train to ride back up to the cable railway and stand in line again.
What Americans were most amazed about were the extremely long runs. They were, however, rather flat. For example, there is a downhill race in Davos called the Parsenn Derby, which is 12km long from top to bottom and only has starting and finishing gates. There are no control gates. Winning time in those days was approximately 7 minutes and that was before offset edges on icy, spring snow.
I quickly learned that a cheese omelet was the best thing to order for breakfast and lunch when I was traveling in Europe. Plus it was the only thing I could pronounce.
My first stop in Austria was in Zurs at the summit of the Flexenpass. If you needed new ski boots, this was the place to buy them. The Martin Strolz family custom-made ski boots in nearby Lech and Martin himself would come to your hotel in Zurs in the evening, measure your feet and at the end of skiing the following day would come to your hotel with a new pair of custom-made ski boots for as much as $19 a pair.
One day at the summit of the Weissfluhjoch, I ran into some of my friends from Southern California who had bought a Volkswagen bug and were spending a month in Europe. Two days later, they were skiing down to Klosters and were both caught an avalanche. Unfortunately, one of them died, but the other one spent the rest of his life living in Germany.
I was tired after three weeks of traveling and filming and when I got back to New York, I was greeted by a flat tire on my red truck plus having a 3,000-mile drive back to Hermosa Beach on a two-lane road ahead of me. This first trip to Europe with my camera kicked my film business into high gear that lasted more than 50 years.
Warren Miller is history’s most prolific and enduring ski filmmaker. Visit warrenmiller.net or his Facebook page at facebook.com/warrenmiller. Read more of Warren’s stories at TheTahoeWeekly.com.
