Ski holidays are, for the most part, a truly fantastic way to spend a break away – but like any other type of travel experience, there can be bumps along the way.
When they’re great, there’s very little else that can compare. Ask anyone who has hit a perfectly groomed run off the first chairlift of the day, or lusciously deep powder the morning after a snowstorm, and they’ll explain that the euphoria is hard to beat. It’s not all about snow either – fine food, romance on the slope and the chance to totally disconnect from the outside world are all reasons why millions are enticed back to the mountains each winter.
However, mishaps do happen in the mountains, from a lack of snow to bruised faces and desperate single parents; when it goes wrong, it can leave a lasting impression.
The Telegraph’s team of ski experts can attest to all this after decades of experience. Here, they share their fondest ski holiday memories – and their worst. Comment below with your highs (and lows) from the slopes.
Lucy Aspden-Kean
‘I’ve visited over 300 ski resorts – you can’t beat Scotland’
I’ve visited over 300 ski resorts in my lifetime, and one resort will always stand out – Scotland’s Cairngorm resort.
In the 1980s, I organised a college ski trip to the mountain located outside Aviemore. It was classic Scottish skiing – gales pushing you back uphill, terrible wind chill, crappy snow, lift queues starting as you got off at the top. We didn’t care, we had fun! I met the love of my life, ended up moving to the Highlands and now have my own “ski hill”. The lesson: make the best of whatever you’re dealt.
Patrick Thorne
‘They let us into the pub at 3pm for a post-race lock-in’
Picture it: the 1980s, fresh off the train following a flight from Canada, my friend Janet and I doing a gap-winter around the Alps. We were in Kitzbühel just long enough to befriend the barmen of The Londoner, during the mayhem of Hahnenkamm race weekend.
After watching the Downhill race, they let us into the pub at 3pm for a lock-in, awaiting the famous VIP post-race party – victorious Franz Klammer and the whole gang, a posse of F1 drivers and euro-celebs, dancing on tables, spraying crates of champagne – 12 Bacchanalian hours of a young life well spent.
Leslie Woit
‘The snow was somewhere between waist and chest high’
I will never forget skiing in Siberia. In November 2019, my friend and IFMGA mountain guide Fred Buttard gathered a group of adventurous skiers to take the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow for four days and nights to Vydrino on the shores of Lake Baikal in the Khamar-Daban mountain range.
From a cosy hotel, we took taxis to the roadside and ski toured up into an immense landscape. The snow was somewhere between waist and chest high; run after run of cold, dry powder on a par with Japan, but longer descents – 1,000 to 1,500m a day. I doubt I will ever return, but the memory of that adventure will stay forever.
Abigail Butcher
‘Michelin-starred food combined with mountain huts’
I adore good food almost as much as good skiing, so it’s no surprise that my best-ever ski trip included a “gourmet ski safari”. This annual culinary delight celebrates the start of the ski season and the launch of the winter’s A Taste for Skiing programme in the Alta Badia region of the stunningly beautiful Dolomite mountains in Italy. Ten Michelin-starred chefs each created a delicious dish that was served at a very reasonable price in a different mountain hut. Five of them were there in person to cook for and chat to us on the hut-to-hut safari, making the experience even more memorable.
Dave Watts
‘No phone signal, no internet, and no showers – but the most fun snow I’ve ever ridden’
Ridder, a hardscrabble mining town in the former-Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan, is not a place that’s on most skier’s maps, but it has the softest, deepest, and most fun snow I’ve ever ridden, anywhere in the world – and that includes Japan.
East Pole, a backcountry lodge built by a local family around a secluded bee-keeper’s cabin, is the perfect place to explore it – using touring skis, snow cats, or the enormous Mi-8 helicopter, which flies in from a nearby airbase for one-off day trips. After a riotous New Year’s Eve party in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s biggest city, my friends and I spent a week there in 2019.
There was no phone signal, no internet, and no showers – instead, guests take bucket baths in the banya (Kazakh sauna) before rolling in the snow. But having an entire mountain range of bottomless snow to ourselves was the ultimate luxury.
Tristan Kennedy
‘Locals call it the Big Couloir and I survived to tell the tale’
The locals call it the Big Couloir, or the Big C, for short. Twisting steeply down for 400m from the summit of Lone Mountain, in the Montana ski resort of Big Sky, this couloir is very big indeed. In January 2022, for some crazy reason, I decided I was going to ski down it. But first of all, I needed to improve my backcountry skills.
Tuition came courtesy of Dan Egan, a former US mogul skiing champion, who spent a week coaching me on the 5,850 acres of resort slopes, as well as on the off-piste sections in between. I loved my time in Big Sky and eventually built up the confidence to take on the Big C, surviving to tell the tale.
Dominic Bliss
‘A dreamlike bucket list experience’
I’ve witnessed firsthand the snowbound alchemy at work in the mountains of Japan, from the volcanic domes of Hokkaido to the steep Alpine faces of Shiga Kogen, blanketed in 14m of champagne powder. When visiting Hokkaido’s Mt Moiwa and cat skiing at Iwani, the snow fell all day in soft, tumbling flakes, covering up our morning fresh tracks, through gladed stands of birch trees. It’s as close as I’ve ever come to surfing down a mountain.
The charming cultural experiences of traditional natural spas (onsens) in Shiga Kogen, visiting snow monkeys in Nagano and flying under the sea in a bullet train to Sapporo combined for a dreamlike, bucket list experience.
Matt Ray
And their worst…
‘Hit from behind by a skier on my first holiday in the French Alps’
I was 15, and a keen – if not particularly skilled – snowboarder when I went on my first holiday to the French Alps. We’d booked a chalet in Val Thorens, and I was frothing about hitting the snow with my siblings, cousins and our family friends, but utterly unprepared for the kind of crowds you find in a French mega-resort.
On the first morning, I was hit from behind by a skier, smashing my face into the snow, and making it swell painfully. So I missed the first few days. Later in the week, a family friend broke both his wrists. “You’d know if they were broken,” said our slightly clueless rep, who’d been guiding us. “Just ride down, they’ll be fine in a bit.” They weren’t.
Tristan Kennedy
‘Downing a bottle of beer through your sock sums up everything awful about Brits abroad’
I was in my early 20s, shy, quiet and out of my depth on a learn-to-snowboard week in an Austrian resort. Learning to snowboard wasn’t too bad – I got the hang of it quite quickly and was off piste and on black runs after five days – but the holiday itself was awful.
I was shoehorned into a tiny, dark single room and the “organised fun” was anything but. Söll is now described as “quaint” and “packed with Tyrolean charm,” but my experience was ruined by an unsavoury après-ski culture at the time. One of the drinking games – downing a bottle of beer through your sock – sums up everything awful about Brits abroad. I’ve not been to Söll or strapped on a snowboard since.
Abigail Butcher
‘Broken lifts, dog bits and massages with a twist’
In the mid-1990s, Pamporovo, Bulgaria, was in the nascent stages of development. Soviet-era hire skis and bald pistes of moon-quality ice as crowded as Oxford Street at Christmas.
I recall workmen “fixing” broken T-bars with giant hammers and “food” at the breakfast buffet a uniform shade of dove grey. After surviving the skiing – a triumph – I had a massage from a grizzled man with a lit ciggie between his yellowed teeth, ashing my back the whole time, using what smelled like haemorrhoid cream and pressing so hard the gurney collapsed. I was subsequently bitten by a St Bernard. But the people were lovely.
Leslie Woit
‘Pre-snowmaking, we had to trudge across mud to ski’
I can’t recall a ski holiday I hated. But 35 years before my best-ever trip (see above), on my second-ever ski holiday I was also in the Dolomites, staying in a Bladon Lines chalet in San Cassiano, where the chalet girls served cheap pasta dishes every night and rationed the wine.
This was pre-snowmaking. The piste links to the next valley were bare and we had to trudge across mud and ski down, avoiding bare patches. The highlight was “tea dancing” in ski boots to live music in the family-owned Rosa Alpina hotel opposite our chalet. It’s now a five-star Aman resort. How times change…
Dave Watts
‘Forced to wear jeans and ski alone’
I was 18 years old, backpacking around the US on Greyhound buses and spent three days in Winter Park, Colorado, in January 1988. I stayed in the youth hostel, paying $10 a night and living on noodles. I had no ski gear and was forced to wear jeans, a baseball jacket and wooden gloves while I skied alone. What’s more, I had a terrible cold and was sniffling and sneezing. It was cold, lonely and miserable in the youth hostel. And because I was underage, I couldn’t even buy a beer.
Dominic Bliss
‘When our flight was cancelled, it was every man for himself’
I don’t know how single parents do it: I took my two children skiing solo when they were still small. That was hard enough, but when a storm hit Isere airport in Grenoble, all flights got cancelled. That meant a mammoth delay, along with hundreds of others desperate to get home.
It was every man for himself, and I couldn’t even leave the kids on their own while trying to get us onto the next flight. In the end, I had both of them on my lap for seven hours straight; just long enough to read 101 Dalmatians out loud, cover to cover. To this day, I still shudder when I see a dalmatian.
Matt Hampton