Three interesting places to ski this winter
An upgrade in Uzbekistan
With its towering mountains and small, Soviet-era resorts, Uzbekistan has long offered “untouched snow and affordable heli-skiing” to the more intrepid traveller – and now its winter sports facilities are getting a “radical upgrade”, says Simon Usborne in the FT. Since the death of the authoritarian and isolationist president Islam Karimov in 2016, the country has seen a steep rise in foreign investment and a “rush to tourism riches”, which has included the construction of four ski resorts in the Chatkal mountains. The first to be completed, Amirsoy, opened in 2019. Two hours’ drive from the capital, Tashkent, it has “immaculate” pistes and a “sparkling” new gondola lift imported from Austria. Its 40 “luxury chalets” are “well-appointed”, if “slightly cheaply constructed”, and the food on offer is decent. Yet the best reason to ski here – in the western reaches of the vast Tian Shan range, which stretches across Kyrgyzstan and into China – is the wildness of its “off-piste boundaries”. For now, at least, you’re as likely to encounter a hunter on horseback as a fellow skier, and the landscape has a remote grandeur that’s reminiscent of Alaska.
Gourmet treats and Olympic thrills in Utah
Park City is “having a moment”, says Amber Gibson in The Daily Telegraph. Founded in the 1860s, this mining town in Utah was on its beam ends when its first ski resort was established in 1963. Its lift-accessed ski terrain then ballooned to become the largest in the US. The annual Sundance Film Festival was first held here in 1981, and it hosted the Winter Olympics in 2002. Now, Utah’s booming tech industry is bringing in a fresh wave of moneyed newcomers. With an “impressive” culinary scene and good live music, shops and galleries, Park City is now “one of the most attractive places in America to live”, though home to fewer than 10,000 people. Choose between the huge Park City Mountain ski resort and Deer Valley, which is more “exclusive” and forbids snowboarders. Luxury lodges include St Regis Deer Valley and the Austrian Goldener Hirsch. And there are thrills beyond the slopes at the Utah Olympic Park, including bobsledding with a professional pilot, and watching Olympians as they train – a “mesmerising” sight.
France’s Sixties ski factories
“Unashamedly modern and massmarket”, the French ski resorts that were purpose-built in the 1960s – Avoriaz, Flaine, Les Arcs and so on – were long dismissed by many as “blocky affronts” (British skiers rechristened “grey, concrete” Flaine as “Phlegm”). But the past decade has seen “a creeping reappraisal” of their design, says Toby Skinner in Condé Nast Traveller – a reflection, perhaps, of “cyclical tastes or just mid-century nostalgia”. Masterminded by the architect Jacques Labro, car-free, high-rise, cedar-clad Avoriaz is like “a retrofuturistic parallel universe”, with its weird angles, “clanking quasi-industrial” external lifts, portholes caked in snow and horse-drawn carts. It “works seamlessly” (everything is easily reachable on skis), it offers great skiing, and its experimental vision (strong on “egalitarian hedonism and madcap creativity”) goes on inspiring town planners today, with new additions such as the “new-retro” Mil8 hotel still sensitive to Labro’s ideas. Originally overseen by the legendary Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer, Flaine is more like “an inner-city polytechnic” at first sight. But it too feels “alive and relevant”, with recent hotel openings including the refurbished Terminal Neige-Totem and the youthful and whimsical RockyPop.