It’s 4pm after a full and hard day’s skiing. The lifts are closing, the sky is darkening gunmetal grey, the wind is whipping, and we are still a long way from home. But that is far from the worst news. My “safe space” route back to the tea and lemon drizzle cake I know is waiting at the chalet is the benign Blue 55, better known as Happy Valley. I hoped I could descend on autopilot, but it is shut after an avalanche. And that only means one thing: we are taking Black 52.
It is not the steepest run I have ever descended, nor the most heavily mogulled. But it is plenty precipitous enough, narrows like a funnel at the bottom, and on this day littered with tired end of day skiers like me, clumsily navigating decaying wet snow — the dreaded porridge.
We make it down, of course we do. But it wasn’t pretty. And as St Anton in Arlberg appears through the sleet, all I can hear is the unmistakable thud of AC/DC emanating from perhaps the most famous apres-ski destination in the Alps, Krazy Kanguruh. I can see skiers dancing on the outdoor tables, some dressed as nuns and bishops, perhaps even the Pope himself among them, headbanging to 'Highway to Hell'. Later, much later, some will risk skiing down the final half mile or so to the village long after dark. They will not have been on soft drinks.
And that is St Anton all over. It is a full on work hard, play hard resort that will challenge you further than you asked for during the day, then drag you out on a wild night of partying once the pistes are closed.
St Anton itself, stretched out along the bottom of the steep sided Rosanna river valley, is just one of a constellation of villages and resorts that make up the vast interconnected Arlberg ski region, the third biggest in the world measured by lifts — it has 87.
The Ski Arlberg pass opens up a banquet of winter sports that even the most enthusiastic 8 to 5 skier would struggle to do full justice to in a week. The most distant sector Warth-Shrocken is so far away it is only just possible to get there and back in a day from St Anton. We were given a stern warning about the peril of missing the last lift back from Warth. It is in a different valley not directly connected by road and a taxi back could cost €200.
The skiing is serious and unforgiving. There are no greens, and what passes for a red in France would only pass muster as a tepid blue here. Long, flattering, tidily groomed 'motorways' are few and far between here. You might get a few hundred metres of it, then find yourself gazing down at a heavily mogulled stretch of red -borderline -black. There are a handful of exceptions, blue 100 down to Alpe Raux, and lovely Blue 200 into Lech among them.
From St Anton you can choose to explore the south facing Rendl ski area to the south — certainly worth a day — or head up the long Gatzig gondola that opens up the rest of the Alberg area. Rendl is a good early-in-the week option, especially if it is cold. But beware the siren call of the Riffel II lift to the top of the mountain. From there you have no option other than navigate Red 16, an utterly terrifying and unpisted mogul field, that I eventually walked down — much to the irritation of the wholly unsympathetic lift attendant who was desperate to shut up for the day and head home for a cold glass of Stiegl. “Is he a beginner?” he said scornfully to my patiently waiting son at the bottom of the run, who did not reveal our connection. I am not, but I felt like it.
St Anton and the surrounding villages first developed as a cradle of alpine skiing - led by local pioneer Hannes Schneider in the 1920s - in part because of its extraordinary record of vast snowfall. Sadly, those days have gone, for now at least. The thermometer in the village showed 16 degrees when we arrived and it barely fell below freezing all week, even at night.
Fortunately even when the rotten snow is making it hard to love the sliding, there are myriad opportunities to indulge in that other exquisite pleasure of a ski trip: The Lunch. The whole Arlberg area is awash with great pit stops. Perhaps our favourite was the Balmalp ski hut (balmalp.at) — complete with Moet & Chandon lounge - perched at the top of the Zugerberg cable car above Lech, the resort most favoured by Princess Diana. As the name suggests it is not a particularly bargain basement option — a bowl of goulash, two pizzas and drinks costs us €83 — but the location and glamour vibe make it a worthwhile trip.
Generally the closer you get to Lech, the more opulent things become. Down in Oberlech we stopped at the Burg eisbar (burghotel-lech.com) watching bankers (we assumed) guzzling vast seafood platters washed down with almost pint sized balloon glasses of expensive rose, as we sipped modestly on beers and cokes.
St Anton itself does not flaunt its exclusivity quite as much, thought it is unmistakeably swish. We stayed in one of the rapidly diminishing number of traditional British run chalets, where a limitless supply of cakes greeted us on our return from the slopes. Prosecco was served at 7.15pm on the dot. It is a way of doing skiing that is in rapid decline thanks to the bureaucratic burden of hiring UK staff since Brexit.
St Anton is a fabulous winter playground, endlessly demanding and stimulating, and a box that has to be ticked by any serious skier. But, for all its vastness, it has relatively little skiing at or above 2000 metres, which makes the pistes vulnerable to any sustained rise in temperature. I hope we were unlucky and just got a dud snow season. I want to go back and have another crack at my nemesis Black 52. Next time in perfect powder.
