Cold, snowy winters
are a defining element
of Alpine lifestyle,
folklore, and tradi-
tions. Gian-Nicola Bass,
who preserves some
of these ways at the
Upper Engadin Cultural
Archives in Switzerland,
believes that soaking
in ice-covered Lake
Sils helps toughen his
immune system.NO MIRACLE will save winter in the Alps. Making
snow, stockpiling it, spraying it on glaciers—all
that will, at best, buy time in a few places.
The beauty of the Alps, the envy of outsiders
long before people here built their lives around
snowy winters, will remain. But the waning
of snow and ice represents an emotional loss,
a loss of culture and identity, as well as an eco-
nomic one. When Switzerland’s Pizol Glacier
shrank to such a tiny sheet of ice that it was
taken off the glacier monitoring service, locals
mourned its death with a funeral.
When I was little, skiing was a pastime
enjoyed by the vast majority of people in the
Alps, no matter their status or income. Like me,in summer—in mountain biking or hiking trails,
summer tobogganing or climbing spaces. Kitz-
steinhorn is seeing an influx of summer tourists
from scorched countries such as Saudi Arabia.
But summer tourism has always existed in the
Alps, and expanding it enough to make up for
the loss of skiing will be hard.
The French village of Abondance, altitude
3,000 feet, is in the middle of this difficult tran-
sition. When its lifts shut down in 2007, it was
described in one news story after another as the
first ski village to fall victim to climate change.
But its 1,400 residents weren’t ready to bid adieu
to skiing. In 2008 they voted in a new mayor,
Paul Girard-Despraulex, who fulfilled his sole
campaign promise and reopened the lifts.
Born into a family of farmers the year the
cable car was built, Girard-Despraulex had seen
his village prosper with skiing. Yet when an
investor approached him with a plan to double
down—to develop Abondance into a massive ski
resort by connecting it with a neighboring one—
the mayor was flabbergasted. The plan would
have entailed blowing up part of a mountain and
destroying an old fir forest. “That’s something
we did not want to do,” Girard-Despraulex says.
Elsewhere in the Alps, too, plans for expand-
ing winter tourism have met resistance. In
Austria, 160,000 people signed a petition to
stop plans to connect the Ötztal and Pitztal ski
areas, again by blowing up part of a mountain. In
Morzine, France, near Abondance, a new cable
car project was halted after locals protested. An
independent analysis had shown that it might
not pay off in an increasingly snowless climate.
In Abondance, Girard-Despraulex is pushing
diversification. Aside from its stunningly beau-
tiful ski area, it now boasts ice-skating on a natu-
ral lake and sleigh rides in winter, as well as more
mountain biking and hiking in summer. There’s
a museum dedicated to Abondance cheese—
dairy farming remains important around the
village. Recently, Girard-Despraulex had the roof
reslated on an abandoned, 900-year-old abbey,
so it could safely open to visitors.
“We have not yet exactly found the right
approach, the right ideas, but we are thinking,
testing, and experimenting,” he says. In the
abbey’s courtyard, he points to a mural depict-
ing the wedding at Cana, where Jesus is said
to have turned water into wine. An upcoming
restoration, the mayor says, will make the faded
colors shine again.
84 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC