Nowhere does a new ski day dawn more brilliantly than at Chetzeron, a boutique hotel perched on a snowfield high above Crans-Montana, a chic resort village anchoring the French-speaking canton of Valais in the Rhone Valley of the Swiss Alps.

The exterior aesthetic of this mountain redoubt of concrete, glass, and steel might be described as Bond Supervillain (especially if you know that Roger Moore spent the final two decades of his life here after purchasing a ski chalet off the resort’s Piste Nationale in 1996). But form follows function: Chetzeron once served as the upper terminal of an aerial tramway that was built in the 1960s and decommissioned in 2004. The lift station sat abandoned until a local hotelier named Sami Lamaa partnered with a Belgian entrepreneur to acquire then retrofit the property. After removing the bull wheel and machinery, glassing in the missing fourth wall where gondola cabs once entered and exited, they transformed the cavernous two-story interior space into one of the world’s most dramatic dining rooms. Chetzeron opened as a white tablecloth restaurant in 2009, then added luxury lodging five years later. For today and one more night, this is my home.

I arrived yesterday evening in the hotel’s lime green PistenBully—other than by snowcat, the only way to get to Chetzeron, at nearly 7,000 feet above sea level, is to ski from the 7,400-foot summit of Cry d’Er, a 30-minute uphill grind in utter darkness from Crans-Montana’s quirky base area. I wake at dawn in one of the hotel’s 16 suites (each named for an Alps peak), as if in a dream, bathed in heavenly light, to one of the most majestic sights I’ve ever experienced from bed. Outside the south-facing window, beyond a Swiss flag fluttering on the inn’s terrace, a stunning tableau of the Alps frocked in full winter commands the entire horizon.

From here, the backbone of Europe looks more like its jawbone: Dozens of the continent’s most famous snow-shrouded pinnacles gnaw at the sky like a row of jagged, bleached teeth. Most prominent, 25 miles almost due south, is the Matterhorn (and, unseen, Zermatt). Along the spine of the Alps some 40 miles to the southwest, the Mount Blanc massif towers above Chamonix in France. I walk to the window and watch transfixed as the Alps glow in a kaleidoscope of red then orange then yellow and finally blanch pure white as the sun begins its westward march.

Funny thing is, I wasn’t supposed to be, or ski, here. 

Last summer, I booked a two-week, mid-January ski vacation to Austria’s Lech Zürs (one of a half-dozen European resorts that participate in Vail Resorts’ Epic Pass program). But I abruptly changed my plans when, in late November 2023, Vail Resorts (VR) announced it had purchased Crans-Montana (including an 84 percent stake in the company that owns and operates the resort’s ski lifts and retail and rental stores, an 80 percent stake in the company that operates the resort’s ski schools, and complete ownership of 11 restaurants on and around the mountain) for $136 million and would invest another $35 million in upgrades and improvements over the next five years. (At the time of this writing, VR reportedly was in negotiation to acquire a third Swiss resort, Flims Laax Falera; a company representative declined to comment about “speculation and rumor” in the European press.)

“Crans-Montana is an iconic ski destination in the heart of the Swiss Alps, with a unique heritage, incredible terrain, a passionate team, and a community dedicated to the success of the region,” Vail Resorts CEO Kirsten Lynch explained in the official release. “Our acquisition of the resort aligns to our growth strategy of expanding our resort network in Europe, creating even more value for our pass holders and guests around the world. Much like Andermatt-Sedrun, we believe Crans-Montana has a unique opportunity for future growth.”

Lynch was referring to another resort in the Swiss Alps VR had purchased for $160 million in March 2022. Nestled in the Urseren Valley of the German-speaking canton of Uri, Andermatt-Sedrun, central Switzerland’s largest ski resort, is just three hours from Crans-Montana by train. When I read about the Swiss acquisitions in November, I wasn’t familiar with either resort, so I did some internet sleuthing, starting with Crans-Montana. 

The origin story chronicled on the resort’s website—remarkably similar to Vail’s—explains that “Crans-Montana was born when two friends from the valley, Louis Antille and Michel Zufferey, fell in love with this majestic plateau during a hunting trip, and opened the first hotel, Le Parc, in 1893.” More hotels and sanatoriums followed, then a 9-hole golf course in 1906 and an 18-hole course two years later. After Switzerland’s longest funicular railway was built to shuttle visitors to the resort from the nearby city of Sierre, the world’s first downhill ski race was held on Crans-Montana’s Plaine-Morte Glacier in the winter of 1911, but then the war happened and the first lift didn’t start spinning until 1936. From the 1960s through its heyday in the 1980s, Crans-Montana served as a haven for A-listers weary of paparazzi-haunted destinations like Gstaad, Verbier, and St. Moritz (after her husband’s death, Jackie Kennedy wintered in Crans-Montana with John-John and Caroline through the 1970s). More recently though, the ski resort had fallen on hard times, suffering for want of investment. I read with interest an article in Neuer Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ, Switzerland’s paper of record) by Zurich-based journalist Andri Nay, published a few days after the VR deal was announced (Headline: “Vail Resorts shakes up Swiss ski market with Crans-Montana purchase: The American group is taking over the Valais ski area and expanding further into Europe. Will the investor be able to make the beleaguered resort profitable?”). Foremost, Nay noted that VR had acquired Crans-Montana from Czech investor Radovan Vítek, who owned a majority stake in the resort and seemed eager to sell. 

“Four years after Vítek bought the majority of the ski resort, he pulled the plug on the cable cars in the middle of the 2018 ski season,” Nay reported. “He stopped operating the ski lifts without further ado to increase pressure. Vítek demanded 800,000 francs from the municipality because it had allegedly not paid promised money. Valais was outraged by this, and the rest of Switzerland was amused. Since then, the municipality has been at loggerheads with the Czech billionaire.”

Nobody, Nay continued, was more delighted with, or relieved about, the transfer of ownership to VR than Crans-Montana Tourism & Congress CEO Bruno Huggler.

“After several months of uncertainty, he is glad to finally know what will happen next,” Nay wrote. “[Huggler] has high hopes for the new investor. In four years, Crans-Montana will host a major event, the Ski World Championships. Vail Resorts has experience in organizing major events in its ski resorts, for example at Whistler Mountain, Beaver Creek, [and] Vail. The Americans are also bringing the necessary money with them to get the ski resort into good condition.… The aging infrastructure is in urgent need of renovations.”

Likewise, Nay continued, Egyptian billionaire Samih Sawiris had courted VR to purchase a 55 percent share of Andermatt-Sedrun Sport AG, a Swiss company that oversees Andermatt’s resort operations, “because the mountain ski lifts were running at a loss and the new partners were supposed to help them make a profit.… It will therefore be exciting to see whether Vail Resorts manages to run a profitable ski resort in a stagnating market given that both Vítek and Sawiris failed to achieve this.”

Since Crans-Montana was but five hours by train from Lech, I halved my Austrian itinerary to spend a week in Switzerland visiting Crans-Montana then Andermatt-Sedrun, experiencing firsthand the unique heritage, incredible terrain, passionate team, and community that Kirsten   Lynch gushed about, and also assess the considerable challenges and opportunities VR had acquired.

A Grand Crans Tour

First on my list: skiing with Bruno Huggler. After gorging on a European-style breakfast (strong coffee, crusty bread hot from the oven, butter, cheeses, and yogurt fresh from a Valais dairy farm), the hotel’s valet fits me with skis and boots and carries my equipment outside Chetzeron’s massive floating-hinged front door. Huggler is running late, so he has sent Crans-Montana Tourism & Congress Marketing Manager Evan Pasquini to begin my tour. I click into carving skis (Europeans prefer to remain on-piste) and follow Pasquini down a meandering intermediate trail to the base of the Crans-Merbé Cry d’Er, Crans-Montana’s signature lift, akin to Vail’s Gondola One or Aspen’s Silver Queen.

We board one of the eight-passenger cabins (vintage 1998) and, after a moment of vertigo leaving the lift station, soar with lift cables humming to the summit of Cry d’Er, where we transfer to a 1980s-era J-bar then ride another lift to the top of a neighboring 8,200-foot peak, Bella Lui. There we pause to briefly behold the majesty of the Alps before schussing down the start of Piste Nationale, where the FIS World Ski Championships men’s downhill and Super-G events will be raced in 2027.

Andermatt-born Swiss ski racer Bernhard Russi (who designed Beaver Creek's Birds of Prey downhill) once described Piste Nationale, which drops 3,220 feet over 2.2 miles, as “the most beautiful men’s Super-G slope.” I don’t disagree, but I only get a taste. Because Pasquini has a group of journalists from an Italian travel magazine to escort, we bail off La Nationale and ski back down to the Cry d’Er base, where I meet Bruno Huggler. Huggler, an affable man in his late fifties, relocated to Crans from another Swiss resort, Saas-Fee, in 1995, smitten by the magnificent panorama I beheld from Chetzeron and just now from Bella Lui. On the gondola ride back up the mountain, Huggler fondly recalls a summer abroad in Steamboat Springs as an exchange student at Colorado Mountain College, and a 2023 business/ski trip to Vail, which the Swiss pronounce like the marine mammal.

From the summit, we ski to the base of Arnouva-Cry d’Er and board Crans-Montana’s newest chair, a six-passenger bubble lift built in 2016 that services FIS slalom terrain designed by and named after Bouby Rombaldi, a Crans pioneer who coached the Swiss women’s ski team at the 1960 Winter Olympics and also was the Kennedy clan’s ski instructor. Huggler proudly tells me that the downhill, one of his favorite runs, is being readied for the women’s World Cup in February. I don’t mention it, but since leaving Chetzeron, I have been struggling to hold an edge with my intermediate-level rental equipment. When Huggler attacks the run with the verve of Rombaldi himself, I launch after him, struggling to stay in his tracks and remain upright. When we rooster tail to a stop at the finish stadium, my heart is pounding, and I am secretly relieved that I have managed not to yard sale and shame myself as a self-appointed ambassador from Vail.

After skiing much of the mountain—with its dichotomy of gentle groomers and World Cup downhills, Crans-Montana reminds me more of Beaver Creek than Vail—we break for lunch at Cabane des Violettes, the resort’s marquee on-mountain restaurant and inn, a clifftop stone hut with red and white shutters owned by the Swiss Alpine Club. The wind has picked up because a storm is rolling in, so we forgo a table on the 120-seat Alps-facing terrace and join the mayhem at one of the community tables in the rustic dining room, which is filled to capacity, and then some. The place is roaring, a babel of Swiss French and Swiss German mostly, with a smattering of Italian, and it strikes me that I haven’t overheard a single English conversation on any of the lifts we’ve ridden all morning. Huggler tells me that 70 to 80 percent of Crans visitors are Swiss, with the remainder mostly from neighboring European countries, and that Americans comprise perhaps 2 or 3 percent of the visitation total. But he hopes that will change once Crans-Montana begins honoring the Epic Pass in 2024–25.

Huggler orders signature dishes for us both from the French menu (as at Chetzeron, everything—veal sausage, chèvre fondue—is hyper-locally sourced from farms and purveyors on or around the mountain, even the Cave Pierre Robyr pinot noir we’re drinking was grown on lower slopes and bottled in Sierre 8.5 miles from the resort; the Swiss are fond of saying their wine is so good they hoard it for themselves—only a fraction of what is produced ever leaves Switzerland).

When I ask Huggler what most impressed him when he last skied Vail Mountain, he talks about the investments he saw in the latest lift, snowmaking, and grooming equipment; how much wider Vail’s pistes seem than Crans-Montana’s, and the almost endless possibilities for off-piste skiing in the Back Bowls.

“I also was surprised—but in a positive way—because there was a person who scans the [lift] ticket,” he adds, noting that at European ski resorts, automated lift ticket scanners are the norm. “To me that was amazing because in Europe you couldn’t pay the staff to do this. It was nice to have these students there to say hello.” 

Huggler also noticed that, excepting The 10th, grab-and-go cuisine is the culinary norm on Vail Mountain.

“My perception is that North American skiers just want to eat as quickly—no, as efficiently—as possible,” he says. “In Europe, the gastronomic part on the mountain takes more importance. The key is you start early and ski until 1 or 1:30 p.m. at the latest, you sit down and have a very good lunch, then you ski back to your place. Americans coming here, they love it, the way it is on the mountain.”

As do I. But as an Epic Pass holder accustomed to the ski experience at VR’s signature resort, I confess to Huggler that I found the Cry d’Er base area to be something of an enigma. Unlike Vail, where all heated cobblestone pedestrian paths lead to Gondola One, Crans-Montana’s primary gondola almost seems hidden. I tell Huggler how, after decamping at the Cry d’Er bus stop in downtown Crans, I walked past a cinema, crowded bars, and cafes on Rue Centrale, thinking I was in the wrong place, until finally I backtracked to an arterial (Rte des Téléphériques, or Cable Car Road) behind the cinema leading to the ski area.

“Crans-Montana was not developed around skiing like Vail, so the base area is a little bit separate,” he explains. “[But] we have a long tradition in hospitality. People here are welcoming and friendly and eager to serve. They are also proud of their resort, the spirit of the pioneers who built this place, who made it what it is today.”

The same might be said about Vail locals, I tell him, and ask how Crans-Montanans feel about their resort’s new owner.

“Mostly they are excited,” he says. “But there also is a little fear: ‘Are they taking over? Will lift tickets still be affordable?’”

Huggler tells me that he met recently with Mike Goar, VR’s Swiss operations manager, who offered assurances that the cost of a Crans-Montana lift ticket would not spike once VR assumes ownership; the day I visited in mid-January, a ticket at the walkup window was priced at 89 CHF/$109, roughly a third of what it cost to ski Vail Mountain on Christmas Day. 

“He answered already in a very positive way and said, ‘No, we are not in Europe to buy and change everything because we know the success of the Swiss destinations is that they have a history, and we have to maintain that history, we have to maintain the different layers that make our resorts different and special.’

“For me, the hope is that they’ll invest. The hope is that we have access to all the North American Epic Pass holders. My wish is to cooperate, to learn from each other, and go ahead to a bright future. We are in a very good way. We have a lot of potential as a resort, and [Vail] will do everything to make this a success.”

After lunch, we ride a vertiginous funitel cableway to the resort’s highest and most distant point, Plaine Morte, a lonely glacial plateau at 9,600 feet above sea level, the historic start of the world’s first ski race (in 1911, it took more than an hour for the winner to reach the finish line in Montana). Here I am reunited with Evan Pasquini and his Italian entourage, who will ski with me back to Chetzeron. On the funitel download, Huggler bids me a somewhat wistful farewell:

“It was a privilege to share with you my mountain, the ski resort that now belongs to Vail.”

Back at my hotel that evening, after four exquisite courses (Vichyssoise, handmade anolini in mushroom broth, rack of lamb with black garlic and potato mille-feuille pastry, and a chestnut-meringue Mont Blanc) prepared by Executive Chef Marco Tacchetto (who most recently helmed the Michelin-starred Orobianco in Spain’s Costa Blanca), I meet with Sami Lamaa in the lobby/lounge area overlooking the dining room. The 58-year-old hotelier tells me he enjoys his idyllic life at Chetzeron, where he keeps an apartment—he snowboards into town to visit family and friends during the winter, and in the summer, he doesn’t wear shoes on meandering walks through alpine meadows where dairy cows pasture from Sierre.

“Crans-Montana is a very low-key resort,” says Lamaa, who after graduating from hotel management school in Geneva helped his parents run Auberge de la Diligence, a three-star inn and restaurant in Montana, before opening Chetzeron. “The village is not that beautiful, but everywhere we are in nature. We have mountains, we have lakes, we have vineyards, and the climate is incredible; we have 300 days of sun each year. Unlike Val-d’Isère, in the off-season, it is dead here; it is quiet.”

Lamaa worries this will change now that Crans-Montana is owned by Vail Resorts.

“In America, they do it for money, they do it for volume,” he adds. “This company, this Vail, it is on the New York Stock Exchange. They are here to make money; they are not here to play around in Switzerland. We love what we’re doing here. We are not money-minded all the time. Vail, it could be good for Crans, but hopefully they will not build horrible things.”

In the morning, before I leave on the funicular, I stop at Taillens, a boulangerie in Montana, to have coffee with Agneta Segerstråle Kane, a family friend Lamaa has arranged for me to meet. Now 83, Kane, who was born in Sweden, settled in Crans-Montana in her thirties after a jet-setting career as a Pan Am flight attendant to raise a family and work as an instructor at the resort’s Swiss Ski School. After attending the 1989 FIS Alpine World Ski Championships in Vail, Kane started spending winters in Colorado as a ski instructor on Vail Mountain, returning to Crans in the summer. Now retired from skiing, it has been 15 years since Kane last visited Vail, but she still reads the Vail Daily online every morning.

What did Kane think when she read the news that VR had purchased Crans-Montana?

“That made me so happy,” she says. “I had the biggest smile in the world.”

On to Andermatt

Aboard the Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn—a legendary Swiss ski train (a.k.a. The Glacier Express) that snakes through the Alps from Zermatt to Andermatt—my anticipation builds the closer we get to our destination. Already filled to near capacity with skiers from Zurich toting luggage and ski and boot bags, four stops out, a trio of backcountry skiers outfitted with avalanche gear boards; at Oberwald, the train acquires a group of sweat-soaked athletes in Lycra toting skinny skis fresh off a 68-mile-long Nordic trail, then plunges into the Furka Base Tunnel, one of the longest in Europe. On the other side after clickety-clacking over the upper Reuss River (Switzerland’s fourth-longest) we arrive in Andermatt, a snow globe of a Swiss village embraced by towering mountains on all sides.

The entire train disembarks onto a platform leading into the Alps equivalent of Manhattan’s Penn Station. The cavernous modern train hall thunders with platoons of ski instructors and helmeted little kids carrying tiny skis all marching in plastic boots down a long, brightly lit concrete tunnel and onto a moving sidewalk then up an escalator that ascends directly to the Gütsch Express, a sleek new (built in 2017) eight-passenger gondola serving intermediate terrain on Nätschen and Güstsch, Andermatt’s sun-drenched main mountain. Even more skiers descend from the village center down another escalator and concrete stairwell.

On a wall at the nexus of the great hall, a billboard beckons to visitors in English. (“Become an Andermatter: Andermatt is open to an international community of likeminded visionaries who have chosen to make this beautiful mountain setting their home.”) Throughout the terminal, electronic reader boards suspended from the ceiling display digital terrain maps updating the status of 33 lifts and 112 miles of ski trails, in addition to train arrivals and departures—from Andermatt, the Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn climbs a cog railway up and over Oberalp Pass (where a 10-passenger gondola added in 2018 ascends to the 8,530-foot summit of Schneehüenerstock and a lighthouse stands on the banks of the Tomasee, source of the Rhine) and becomes a secondary ski lift, stopping at base areas in the villages of Diene, Sedrun, and Disentis in the canton of Grisons, where the locals speak Romansh, a relic Latin language from the Roman Empire.

Across from a subterranean gourmet grocery and next door to a bustling ski rental shop, I duck into the lift ticket office and surrender my Epic Pass to an agent, who cheerfully asks (in English) how many days I intend to ski (if I wanted, I could stay through the end of the season), and informs me that I am the third American today who has exchanged an Epic Pass and it’s not even noon. On a flat-panel display, I see that a full-fare lift ticket in Andermatt—two years after being acquired by VR—still costs 89 CHF, the same as in Crans-Montana.

From the station, I walk the shoulder of a busy asphalt lane between twin skier lots to Andermatt Reuss, an under-construction secondary village rising from 20 acres on the banks of the Reuss that’s so new, it seems, sidewalks to the development have yet to be built. There, I check into the Radisson Blu Hotel Reussen, a handsome, nine-story contemporary hotel clad in textured, stone-hued concrete and wood that opened in December 2018 and reminds me of The Westin in Avon.

In the lounge at the center of the sumptuous lobby, I find a coffee table book, Andermatt: A Vision for Swiss Alpine Living, with an introduction by Samih Sawiris, the Egyptian billionaire and chairman of Andermatt Swiss Alps AG, a real estate development firm orchestrating Andermatt’s rebirth. After first visiting in 2005 (at the behest of a friend in the Swiss government) and seeing the promise of a village in decline, Sawiris convinced 96 percent of Andermatters to approve by referendum an ambitious $2.1 billion redevelopment plan that included the construction of a five-star luxury hotel anchoring Andermatt’s historic center (Chedi Andermatt, sister of Oman’s opulent Chedi Muscat), a new ski village with 28 custom villas, 42 luxury apartment buildings and a 244-room four-star hotel (Andermatt Reuss and the Radisson Blu), an 18-hole golf course, a 650-seat concert hall, and the modern lift network now owned and operated by Vail Resorts.

“Since day one of our efforts to revitalize the village, our goal has been to turn this beautiful and easily accessible place into a year-round destination with exciting job opportunities and countless possibilities for outdoor activities,” Sawiris writes. “Today, the old and new parts of the village blend organically, attracting shop owners, restaurateurs, hoteliers and visitors alike, while the ski area with its state-of-the-art lifts and slopes, the golf course and new concert hall are among the best in the country.… Not so long ago, our ambition was eyed with skepticism [and] now we find there’s a lot of confidence in us to pioneer a fresh experience in Swiss Alpine Living.”

It strikes me that in visiting Andermatt-Sedrun, I may be witnessing the future of Crans-Montana.

Later, across Piazza Gottardo at Restaurant Biselli, I meet Mike Goar in the lounge for an Aperol spritz aperitif. The longtime COO of Park City Mountain moved to Andermatt in 2022 after VR finalized its purchase of Sawiris’ Andermatt-Sedrun Sport, as the resort’s managing director. At the end of another long day of meetings (which, he sighs, inevitably revert to English as he struggles with Swiss German), the sixtysomething American ski company executive-turned-expat, wearing a logoed black Andermatt-Sedrun ski jacket and ballcap, looks tired, yet content.

“We’re still in the infancy stage; even five years ago most of what you see was not even here,” says Goar, who in May was appointed to oversee all of VR’s Swiss operations, gesturing out the window at cranes towering over the new village.

Given its strategic location at the confluence of the Gotthard, Furka, and Oberalp passes at the center of the Alps, since 1885 Andermatt was the primary garrison of the Swiss Federal Army, and the village—its hotels, restaurants, and shops—thrived. But in the late 1990s, the Swiss Army largely decamped, shuttering all but its training center, and with it went 30 percent of Andermatt’s jobs, devastating the local economy.

“Before Samih came, Andermatt was a military town that relied on soldiers and families coming periodically for vacation,” Goar explains. “When the Swiss government decided it was going to ramp down its presence, it really put the community in a bit of a precarious spot. That’s how Samih landed here. He’s made a tremendous investment in this evolution of Andermatt that is well underway and is growing quite rapidly. It’s a credit to him. He’s done a great job.”

And now the torch has been passed to Vail Resorts.

“We said, ‘This is a wonderful start. Let’s build on that momentum and use our expertise in mountain operations and develop a thoughtful strategic plan focused on enhancing the overall guest experience,” he says.

For Andermatt, that might include building a lift connecting the villages of Diene and Sedrun, a missing link that would extend village-to-village lift-served skiing from Andermatt to Disentis, more than an hour east by train. And for Crans-Montana, in addition to adding 43 new snow guns and upgrades to two on-mountain restaurants, another item on the to-do list might include better integrating the ski area with its village center.

“You’ve got to create this energy, a sense of arrival, that you’re in the right place, that you’re in the front door, not the back door,” Goar says, after I tell him about my Cry d’Er misadventure.

But the goal for both resorts, he stresses, isn’t importing Vail Village or Vail Mountain to Switzerland.

“Let’s not assume that a North American 500-seat restaurant like Two Elk is the restaurant to build on the mountain here,” he says. “That’s not the experience that guests want. Visitors are coming here for a different experience.… We are here to learn. That’s particularly true in how we build relationships in this community. It’s about maintaining the character and the history of these villages and never losing sight of what is here and what makes these places special.”

All the while luring ever more Epic Pass holders, like myself, to Switzerland. Later in March, NZZ will publish an article (“American Tourists Are Flocking to Swiss Ski Resorts”) documenting a surge in American skier visits to Swiss resorts like Andermatt, where the number of annual overnight hotel stays by US guests leapt from 1,966 in 2021 to 12,099 in 2023.

“The boom in the Urseren Valley can be explained by a business deal,” NZZ claims. “In spring 2022, Vail Resorts, the world’s largest operator of ski resorts, announced its intention to buy the Andermatt-Sedrun ski resort. By the following winter season, it belonged to the Americans. The guests from overseas came to Andermatt with the American investors. This was mainly due to the Epic Pass.”

At the train station’s VR-owned ski shop after breakfast at the Radisson Blu, not wanting to repeat my performance in Crans, I demo a brand-new pair of $2,200 Swiss Five Star slalom skis with stiff racing boots and find 22-year-old Sales Danioth waiting for me outside.

In Andermatt, the Danioths are ski town royalty, akin to the Seiberts and Eatons, the founding families of Vail. Sales’ uncle oversees Andermatt's ski patrol; his father is head of logistics and operations at Andermatt Reuss; his mother runs the Rüti Hütte après bar on Nätschen; and his cousin, Aline Danioth, a World Cup ski racer who won gold at the 2019 World Championships and placed 10th in slalom at the 2022 Winter Games, is Andermatt’s Mikaela Shiffrin.

My dashing young guide from Andermatt's Swiss Ski School (also owned by VR), who is a year younger than my daughter, looks at my skis approvingly and announces, “We are going to Gemsstock to carve.”

At 9,715 feet, the glaciered Gemsstock, which towers over Andermatt, is the resort’s highest and most challenging mountain. Gemsstock’s signature Russi Run, named for Andermatt’s most-celebrated ski racer, Olympic gold medalist Bernhard Russi, also is one of the longest (3.7 miles) and steepest (vertical drop: 3,117 feet) pistes in Switzerland.

We clomp past the Chedi, which occupies an entire block across from the train station, and follow a snow-covered path along the banks of the burbling Reuss through the center of the old village, the crisp mountain air amplifying bells tolling from a 17th-century Catholic church and avalanche cannons thundering on Gemsstock. At the luftseilbahn terminal, across from the Aurora Hotel (where Sean Connery was filmed after a famous Aston Martin race scene from the 1964 Bond classic, Goldfinger), we crowd into the 60-passenger Gurschen-Bahn and leap into the sky as a gaggle of Epic Pass skiers from New York chatter excitedly about their first European ski trip.

Midmountain, we transfer to a larger cable car (the 80-passenger Gemsstock-Bahn) that disgorges us atop the summit, where I follow Danioth out onto the Gurschen Glacier and the knee-knocking start of the Russi Run. We spend that entire morning on Gemsstock working through drills—edge rolls down the fall line, stork turns (lifting the tail of the inside ski)—Danioth fine-tuning my carve, seeking perfection but settling on passable. From Gemsstock, we clomp through the streets of the old village center—dodging cars, buses, delivery vans, and jaywalking skiers flitting in and out of half-timbered family-owned inns, restaurants, and boutiques—and board the eight-passenger Gütsch Express and soar above Nätschen (beginner terrain, named for a lesser peak) to the 7,690-foot summit of Gütsch, which boasts two Michelin-star restaurants.

We ski down a snowfield past four giant wind turbines (which power the resort’s lifts and snowmaking machines) to Wachthuus, a mountain hut with vintage photos of Bernhard Russi and stills from Goldfinger on the walls, where we lunch on high-caloric helpings of rösti (butter-fried shredded potatoes) and local bratwurst in onion sauce. Danioth tells me about his earliest memory (skiing with his father) and growing up in Andermatt racing with his teenage buddies on Nätschen and Gütsch, lapping rickety old lifts. He has been skiing since he was 3, racing since 16, and guiding for seven years. Prior to the Vail Resorts acquisition, Danioth, who is bankrolling a master’s degree in physics from the University of Zurich with his earnings as a ski instructor, says he rarely had American clients, and this winter already I am one of many (including VR CFO Angela Korch and her family, who skied with Danioth for four days). I ask my Gen Z ski guide how Andermatt has fared under the tutelage of Samih Sawiris and now Vail Resorts.

“It was a broken town; [on Gütsch] we just had one T-bar and two chairlifts,” he says. “Then Samih Sawiris came with this idea to build a resort in the Alps really of out nothing. Everything has changed. Now everything is new. We even have artificial snow, which nowadays you need so you can open the slopes. Andermatt is growing and growing each season. Before our mountain was Egyptian; now it is American, but it is still our mountain.

“We have a good partnership with Vail. They are looking after our mountain; they know how to handle it. It is good to have Vail Resorts behind us. With the Epic Pass, we will see that even more [Americans] will come. Many who will say, ‘I will go to Switzerland, visit Crans-Montana then come to Andermatt.’”

Just like me.

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Go

Daily round-trip flights from Denver to Geneva or Zurich via Swiss Air
Daily rail service from Geneva or Zurich to Crans-Montana and Andermatt via Swiss Railways

Stay

Chetzeron (Crans-Montana)

Radisson Blu Hotel Reussen (Andermatt)

Dine

Cabane des Violettes (Crans-Montana)

Gütsch by Marcus Neff (Andermatt)

Ski

Crans-Montana

Andermatt-Sedrun

Buy

Crans-Montana

Alpine Homes International

Andermatt

Andermatt Swiss Alps AG