High style
The Swiss resort of Verbier has no shortage of smart places to stay, but one address opening this winter will stand head and shoulders — and more than a thousand vertical metres — above all the others.
The Cabane Tortin, due to open its doors on December 14, will offer all the usual trappings of a luxury chalet, including a private chef, two live-in hosts, a dedicated mountain guide, Egyptian cotton sheets and fluffy robes, a sauna and visiting therapists for massages and facials. But it will do so in a remarkable location, perched alone on a rock band above the Tortin glacier, 2,994 metres above sea level — higher than the vast majority of the Alps’ basic climbers’ refuges. There will be fine wines but also an emergency oxygen supply for anyone struck by altitude sickness.
Guests will arrive by skiing off piste from the top of the celebrated Mont-Fort cable car, or by trekking or ski touring across the glacier from the lifts at the Col des Gentianes (for the less active, it is also possible to take a caterpillar-tracked buggy or helicopter). Designed by Norwegian architects Stinessen, with a stark concrete base and huge glass sections, it is already being compared to a Bond villain’s lair (in fact it stands 24 metres higher than Blofeld’s fantastical hide-out atop the Schilthorn in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service).
The original Cabane Tortin was built on the site in 1981 by members of the ski club in the nearby village of Nendaz. It later became a refuge, offering meals and basic accommodation to climbers and ski tourers, and passed into the ownership of a private company based in Sion. In 2021 it decided to demolish the cabin for a radical ground-up rebuild — and a radical new business model.
Upstairs, it now sleeps eight in great comfort, with prices starting at SFr60,000 (£53,000) for six people, or SFr68,000 for eight, for three nights. The staff sleep downstairs, where there is space for eight in four double “pod” rooms. However, a condition imposed by the commune of Nendaz, which still owns the land, demands continued public access — so when the upstairs isn’t occupied, the downstairs will become available as the “Bivouac des Gentianes”, a sort of deluxe mountain refuge (at SFr2,000 per night for eight). On those occasions, the two lucky hosts will get to move to the rooms upstairs to become the most lavishly accommodated hut guardians in the Alps. cabanetortin.com
The ski pass that can save your life
After more than five years of development, a new type of ski pass launches in Italy this winter which could revolutionise on-mountain safety and guard against every skiing parent’s nightmare — losing their child somewhere on the slopes. LifePass uses a combination of GPS, cellular and LoRa (low-powered radio) technologies to track and transmit its location. If a skier has an accident, they will be able to press an SOS button on the pass to instantly send their location to ski patrollers and summon help. If a child has a pass in their pocket, their parents could sit in a restaurant and monitor their movement around the resort via a map on a smartphone.
The pass was created by Mountain Technologies, a start-up with bases in Belfast, Verbier and Milan, in partnership with the Italian resort of La Thuile, and early input from the digital mapping company FATMAP. This first year, the pass will only be available in La Thuile but Mountain Technologies plans to release it in five more resorts next winter.
The pass is the same size as a credit card but about a centimetre thick; its battery lasts for a week. Pricing has yet to be confirmed but it will be no more than €4 per day above the cost of the conventional pass; users will pick the passes up from (and return them to) the existing ticket offices or use self-service dispensing machines in hotels and hire shops.
Whereas mobile phones offer some tracking functionality, they have numerous drawbacks — cellular service is unreliable in the mountains, tracking apps drain batteries rapidly and screens will stop working in freezing conditions. Apple AirTags and similar products rely on Bluetooth, so only transmit a location if someone else with a phone passes nearby — unlikely in a remote mountain location. For resort operators, LifePass also offers the advantage of being able to track skier flows with far greater precision than previously possible. lifepass.eu
The beautiful north
With snowfall in the Alps becoming increasingly capricious, tour operators are looking north, launching a swath of new trips to Scandinavia, including to some remote, offbeat destinations.
Ski Solutions, for example, will be offering its first trips to Narvik, a small port town 220km north of the Arctic Circle with six lifts, where between December 5 and January 6 the sun does not rise (thankfully the pistes are floodlit). Also new for Ski Solutions, Crystal and Iglu Ski is Gausta, west of Oslo, a resort that has remained under-the-radar partly because its highest peak, and the mountain railway inside it, was a top-secret Nato listening post from 1959 until the 1990s.
The airline Norwegian has new direct flights from Gatwick to Narvik starting on November 2, and from Bergamo to Narvik the following month. Lufthansa subsidiary Discover Airlines has a new flight from Frankfurt to Alta, in northern Norway, starting in December; Tui Airways launches a service from Manchester to Oslo the same month. And in February, SAS will restart a service it last operated before the pandemic, from Heathrow to Scandinavian Mountains Airport, where the runway is less than 10km from the pistes at Stöten — a resort being newly offered this winter by Ski Scandinavia.
Despite the ski areas typically being much smaller than those in the Alps, Andy Hemingway, Norway and Sweden product manager at Ski Safari, says their popularity is being driven by empty slopes, lack of lift queues, scenery, reliable snow and improving exchange rates (£1 is worth about NKr14, up from less than NKr12 two years ago). “Once our customers visit, they just keep going back,” he says.
Deer Valley doubles in size
A post-pandemic boom in skier numbers in the American Rockies has fuelled expansion at numerous resorts, but none matches the ambitions of the project under way at Deer Valley, Utah. This December, the self-styled luxury resort — slogan “ski the difference” — will unveil the first stage of the biggest terrain expansion in the US for 40 years.
Skiers (snowboarders remain banned) will find three new lifts and 300 acres of additional terrain. Next year, there will be six more new lifts and 100 extra runs. The complete “expanded excellence” project will see a total of 16 new lifts, more than doubling the resort’s terrain to 5,726 acres, and seven new hotels.
The project dates back to 2014, when New York-based Extell Development Company began acquiring land to the east of the existing resort. Known for Manhattan skyscrapers including Central Park Tower, Extell had no prior experience of developing ski resorts but hatched a $2bn plan to build a brand-new resort called Mayflower. Last year, Extell and Alterra Mountain Company, the owner of Deer Valley, announced they’d reached an agreement under which the Mayflower brand would be abandoned and the new terrain would be operated by, and integrated with, Deer Valley.
Pink Snow 2024
This article is part of our annual winter sports special, Pink Snow — look out for a series of pieces published throughout the week
Neighbouring Park City Mountain Resort remains the largest ski area in the US with more than 7,300 acres, and is separated from Deer Valley by nothing more than a rope and a no-entry sign. Unfortunately, fierce rivalry between Alterra and Park City’s owner Vail Resorts means the alluring prospect of creating one of the world’s true mega resorts — simply using a pair of scissors — is unlikely any time soon.
The open-air gondola
It is a bumper winter for new cable cars. Three years after Courchevel’s biggest cable car, the Saulire, was damaged in a testing accident, it will finally reopen on December 6, with new cabins offering floor-to-ceiling laminated glass windows. In Switzerland, there’s a new cable car from Stechelberg to Mürren which, at a maximum incline of 58 degrees, claims to be the world’s steepest. Meanwhile Grouse Mountain, just outside Vancouver, is asking members of the public to submit artworks to be wrapped around its new gondola.
The prize for the strangest cable car update, however, goes to La Plagne in France. Its new offering, Aérolive, consists of two red gondolas stripped back to a simple metal frame. Up to six passengers are secured by harnesses and can lean out of the gondola as it climbs; the floor is a grill through which they can look down to the pistes below.
The Aérolive cabins will be added on demand to the Glaciers lift, introduced last year, which runs up to 3,080 metres on a flank of the Bellecôte, the highest point in the ski area. What the resort calls an “exhilarating new experience set to take adventure seekers to new heights” will cost €55, but will it be that much more exciting than riding a chairlift?
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