my childhood friend Dominik and his partner,
Julia, were pushed onto the slopes at a very
early age. Less than three decades on, their son,
Johann, who just turned four and is my godson,
is fascinated by snow. But he knows it largely
from songs and books.
On a sunny Sunday last February, we drive up
Unterberg mountain near Vienna, in the east-
ernmost Alps, in search of the real stuff. Just
underneath the 4,400-foot peak, we find a little
winter. “It sparkles!” Johann yells, tossing him-
self in the snow and gingerly licking it from his
mitten. He wants to build a snowman, but the
snow is less than an inch deep.
His mother, Julia, 33, learned to ski here. “We
never even wondered if Unterberg would have
enough snow to open,” she says, as we trudge past
the idle T-bar lifts. When those lifts were about
to close for good in 2014, locals crowdfunded
almost $83,000 to keep them going. But at this
altitude it’s too warm to invest in snowmaking.
So Unterberg relies solely on natural snow, pro-
moting itself as a ski area where “the snow still
falls from the sky.” Last winter, that made for 10
days of skiing. The winter before, zero. jAfter reporting for years in Asia, Austrian writer
Denise Hruby has returned home to focus on
environmental challenges in Europe. Ciril Jazbec,
a Slovenian, photographed India’s ice stupas—
small, artificial glaciers—for the July 2020 issue.SAVING WINTER 85