Where to Ski: Europe Guides

ChrisC

ChrisC

Well-known member
These were excellent guides for skiing, lodging, eating, etc. I own them all and found them helpful.

Unfortunately, they are being cleared out at great prices.

Shop | Guide Editors

www.editors.co.uk www.editors.co.uk




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Dear WTS reader

Please forgive me for sending this one message to four groups of people.
I'm not an email management expert.​

  • If you received the original message below at some point in the last 10 days and ignored it, I apologise for bothering you again.​
  • If you received it and bought some books, thank you – and apologies again for the delay in fulfilling your order.​
  • If you received it and replied to express your appreciation of what Dave Watts and I have done over the last 40 years, I offer heartfelt thanks. These messages – many of them quite moving – run into hundreds, and it would be a mammoth task to respond individually.​
  • If you didn't receive the earlier message, it may have gone into your spam folder because of a technical problem that has only now come to my attention. This resulted in my own email address being replaced by one based on a Wix domain. The problem is now (I hope and believe) resolved.​

Here is my original message:

I've been putting off the job of writing this bulletin for months – arguably for a year, given the time that has elapsed since I was last in touch. But the time has come. With regret, I am winding up the Where to Ski business.

It's 43 years since I started planning the first edition of the Good Skiing Guide. I edited seven editions of that ground-breaking book before I fell out with the publishers and, in partnership with Dave Watts, started up Where to Ski, subsequently Where to Ski and Snowboard. The Good Skiing Guide and other rivals fell by the wayside but Watts and I plugged away from 1994 to 2015, when we finally came to the realisation that spending our summers revising a 700-page annual guide was too much like hard work.

After a year off, I then spent the summers of 2017, 2018 and 2019 producing the new Where to Ski series covering Austria, France and Italy. I would have spent the summer of 2020 producing Where to Ski in Switzerland, but Covid-19 intervened, bringing work on that volume to an abrupt halt in January. The pandemic proved to be something of a watershed for me. In its aftermath I found I had no appetite to resume (largely to repeat) my work on Switzerland. And rather to my surprise I also found that I no longer had much of an appetite for skiing itself. That's largely an age/ fragility/ confidence thing. I took a while to come to terms with it.

The good news for some recipients of this email is that I now need to dispose of the remaining stocks of the WTS guides. They are now for sale on the Guide Editors site for not much more than the print cost – £1.99 a copy. The charges for post and packing make this offer less of a bargain, I know, but they are inescapable. My warehouse would tell you that the charges reflect their costs – that they pay their staff a decent wage and don't make unreasonable demands on them – but that may not be the whole story.

If you don't have the full set of three guides, you really should. If you have chums or rellies who lack them, now's the time to put that right with a Christmas gift. Here's the link to our online shop. Don't delay – I'll give you a few days to pick up the copies you need, before launching a social media campaign to clear the rest. And when they're gone, they're gone.

Whether you do or you don't want to buy, if you are active on social media it would be really helpful if you could find the time to spread the word about this offer – quoting the shop address www.editors.co.uk/shop. Thanks.

Why not sell the business? I hear you say. The short answer is that I would expect it to be hard work. Mr Watts and I invested a lot of effort in trying and failing to sell the original Where to Ski and Snowboard property a decade ago, and I don't see the current Where to Ski property being any easier. Of course, if anyone out there fancies themselves as a writer/ editor/ publisher, and likes the idea of combining business with pleasure, I'd be delighted to hear from you. No reasonable offer refused.

I'm not putting my feet up. I am working on an exciting new product about the wonderful South West Coast Path for publication next spring, which may lead to others. When I've worked out how to do it, I'll send out another bulletin that will allow you to register interest in that publication.

Thank you for your support, in whatever form, over whatever period. (There are people on this list who have been with us since the start.) I hope you have found the books Watts and I have produced over the last 40-odd years useful and enjoyable. Despite all those lost summers, we really enjoyed producing them.

With best wishes – enjoy the coming season, and all the others ahead.

Chris Gill, editor, Where to Ski
chris.g@wheretoski.co.uk​
 
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End of an era. When I planned a ski trip to Europe in 2003 I used his book Where to Ski and Snowboard Europe. It was a very fine resource. I checked out the book at a local library. I'd love to return to ski Europe again, but I'm having too much fun in recent years skiing and exploring the American West.
 
Tony Crocker said:
James probably doesn't need them!
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The most recent one I have is the 2017 edition of Austria. They were/are a great resource and I've posted photos of specific chapters over the years -- most recently this one for Grand Massif because I planned to go there on the way from GVA to Val d'Isère (I ended up skiing Courchevel with Tony and Liz). They have a colorful, easy-to-navigate layout with helpful maps and extensive info about lodging, food and beverage, ski schools, etc. I used them a lot in my early years visiting the Alps, although there were a couple downsides for me:
  • They cover mainly major destination resorts, especially those with a big presence of UK ski-holiday companies (part of their business plan) and only rarely the off-the-beaten-path joints that I prefer. Understandable as I'm an outlier destination skier.
  • You learn as much about the preoccupations of British ski tourists as you do about the areas themselves: complaints about slow chairs and surface lifts, insufficient signage, and locals who have the nerve not to speak enough English for their comfort. Experts could argue that the coverage is slanted toward casual (on-piste) skiers.

A shame about this part of the announcement:
to my surprise I also found that I no longer had much of an appetite for skiing itself. That's largely an age/ fragility/ confidence thing. I took a while to come to terms with it.
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-- however, that's a possible "danger" with any pastime. Sometimes it's a lifelong passion that you never tire of; other times, it's like a food or beverage that you enjoyed for years before finally burning out and moving on to something else. I suppose it's similar for me -- until I move closer to skiing, I'm growing weary of planning and executing long-distance destination trips (despite being talented at it). I enjoy golf and mountain biking as much as skiing and they're so much easier logistically as well as less expensive.
 
It's always sad to see someone age-out of this sport we're all crazy about. I have a very sore lower back right now and couldn't ski if I wanted to. Hopefully, with a few more rest days it will pass. When your health and/or passion fades there is not much you can do, but look to other things to fill the void. One of the big things with having friends to ski with vs. skiing solo is the motivation and support you get from friends.
 
jimk said:
It's always sad to see someone age-out of this sport we're all crazy about.
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jimk said:
I'd love to return to ski Europe again, but I'm having too much fun in recent years skiing and exploring the American West.
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No offense here, but the number of years jimk has left to ski in the Alps at the level he currently skis at Snowbird are not unlimited. My recent trip to Mammoth has reinforced the trend in my 70's to be way pickier about the intersection of challenging terrain and snow conditions. I've observed this in a few of my contemporaries like Garry Klassen for awhile before feeling personally that I needed to limit my skiing expert terrain to the most cherry picked surfaces and to fewer such runs per day than a few years ago (pre-COVID in my case). And I'm sure jimk like me knows many people our age who only ski groomers or have dropped out completely. Hopefully jimk has read enough TRs here to understand that advanced skiers really need to get to the Alps before they are relegated to just groomer skiing.

Jimk's ski list is quite typical of avid American skiers based in the East. The only gap I see in the American West is the Interior Northwest, with Schweitzer and Whitefish being the only prominent (IMHO) areas anywhere in the U.S. that he has not skied.

There's also the partial resistance to crossing borders. Jimk's Canada trips are only to Whistler, Banff and Quebec City, quite typical of American skiers. When I collaborated with Leslie Anthony on my Powder Magazine article in 1995, I had only skied one week at Whistler. He touted the virtues of the "Powder Highway" areas of interior B.C., so I first skied there in 1997 and that region has been a regular feature of my ski seasons ever since.
jimk said:
One of the big things with having friends to ski with vs. skiing solo is the motivation and support you get from friends.
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We have discussed this in another thread. I suspect one trait that defines the true nutcases like Patrick, myself and occasionally ChrisC is that some ski objectives are sufficiently important that we are willing to do them solo. I'm jealous of what ChrisC scored in the Dolomites last spring, and some of what he skied then is probably beyond my pay grade at age 72.

Those first Powder Highway trips 1997-99 were solo. When I retired in 2010, my first ski priority was Japan and that was solo for 2 weeks. I also signed up solo in October 2010 for Antarctica in 2011 and only the following spring was I fortunate to meet Liz in person and then invite her along. I can say that there were a few solo male skiers on that trip who were quite envious of my situation.

Patrick has been solo on the vast majority of his streak related June - October skiing.

Jimk also has the issue of a non-skiing(?) spouse. If your S.O. is a casual skier, there are numerous Alps destinations that are a great fit with outstanding scenery, dining and other amenities. Zermatt, the Jungfrau region and the Dolomites come to mind and I'm sure James by experience could suggest many more. We have as yet been unsuccessful in convincing Tseeb to try this with Lucia.

I'll defer even more to James for suggestions with a partner who doesn't ski at all, maybe a city like Innsbruck, where the skiing partner will have to commute to the ski areas. Liz and I have done this twice from Sierre in the Upper Rhone Valley.
 
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Sbooker said:
A responsible forum boss would encourage Jim by planning a get together somewhere in the Alps in 2026.
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It took until 2023 for our path to intersect with James' in Serre Chevalier. We had 3 days with ChrisC in 2019 at Engelberg and Andermatt and one day with sbooker and family in 2023 at Les Arcs.
 
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Anybody ever use the Glacier Express in winter to ski at both St. Moritz and Zermatt on the same trip? That always struck me as a fun thing to attempt.
Another bucket list item I had was to ski the Vallée Blanche, but that doesn't seem too fun/feasible anymore:
Might not be embeddable , see here.

BTW, I think that PeakRankings guy puts out some good stuff!
 
jimk said:
Anybody ever use the Glacier Express in winter to ski at both St. Moritz and Zermatt on the same trip?
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No, but that sounds like an idea you should consider. It won't happen with us due to our rental car mode of travel to chase conditions. Both resorts favor late season, though there are some seasons where Zermatt's best off piste doesn't get covered adequately. I'm still waiting to get another shot at that after the excellent week Liz and I had there in 2014.
jimk said:
Another bucket list item I had was to ski the Vallée Blanche, but that doesn't seem too fun/feasible anymore
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The PeakRankings guy saw distinctly subpar conditions. The hike from the top of Aiguille de Midi looked gnarlier than mine in 2004 and 2018. I never had to ski refrozen snow lower down either. I know 2018 was a big year; thus we could ski into town after a ~500 vertical 20 minute hike. In 2004 I walked a few stairs and took the gondola up to the cog railway. It makes sense that the receding glacier depth would prompt them to extend that gondola. I do not believe that the gondola terminal area will lack snow cover in the typical February-April season for quite some time.
jimk said:
BTW, I think that PeakRankings guy puts out some good stuff!
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Some, but I have seen a few and have some disagreements. That's very few because I dislike the time suck of long videos to consume information.
 
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