Ski Resort Review: St Anton

Sankt Anton am Arlberg is a quaint little village dotted with authentic high-alpine chalets carefully tailored by precise Austrian attention to detail. It is tastefully complemented by traditional, family-run restaurants serving a medley of traditional Austrian cuisine neatly juxtaposed with modern European fine-dining. All this is swathed in some of the best snow and skiing known to human-kind.

Oh wait, no it isn't. That's what i wanted it to be! Actually it's a heaving mass of drunken Austrian/English/German/Swiss speed-crazed lunatics stumbling from one gaudy, awful, noisy, identical pub to the next in search of the highest alcohol-to-Euro ratio.

Ok, so minus the unnecessary adjectives, St Anton is really set in a very deep U-shaped valley. It was very dark in January with our chalet getting only about 4 hours of light a day. St Anton serves no other purpose than to get skiers into completely ridiculously over-the-top lifts up to the top of the mountain so that they can get back down to those pubs as fast as possible. This is despite the innumerable billboards blotting out the landscape urging, nay, pleading with you to come back in the summer because, really, it's not all about the skiing.

It really does have fancy lifts though. The Galzig lift first takes you on a ferris-wheel ride and then hooks you on the cable which lifts you in perfect comfort up to about 2000m. Great. The Valfagehr lift from Stuben has heated seats and a snow-screen, as does the new futuristic Rendl bubble. Wonderful. You know, i'd rather spend about 20 Euros less per day and have plain old normal lifts. Moan moan moan.

The thing is, St Anton is all very fancy-pants with its cool lifts and clearly very expensive marketing and shiny golden lined pistemaps, but it's completely ruined by the populace who are only there for the booze and the wide, flat racing pistes.

We didn't get to choose where to eat, but every single pub seemed to be blaring the same music (for people in neighbouring resorts to hear) and serving the same bland ubiquitous food. I ate at a place called the "Funky Chicken" which was like Nandos without the spice. Some random pizza joint, and then a "Mexican" place which served Tex-Mex but was decorated with US number plates and ski-jumping skis. Bizarre. Oh and i had an enchilada which they called a burrito. It was expensive.

Ok, but who cares right, because as long as you have hot food, it's all about the skiing. Ok, so, again, i didn't get to choose where to ski but was quite happy to pootle about find what off-piste i could along the way. There wasn't much powder to be found and it was mostly very shallow and dangerously hiding nasty rocks on which i ground my edges several times but the powder i did find was excellent. Dry, soft, fluffy. Brilliant.

My impression from mostly piste-skiing St Anton was that it's quite flat. The blues are green, the reds blue, and the blacks red. Their marked off-piste red-diamond runs were reddish and i didn't get to ski the "extreme" marked off-piste black-diamond runs but from what i could see from the chair, that would just be a normal black here in the Portes du Soleil.

The St Anton pistes were extremely wide, inviting the kind of skier for whom turning is just too much hassle so most of the runs consisted of insane weekender morons going as fast as they possibly can with no style whatsoever down blue runs. I saw a (probably) 8 year old child nearly get wiped out by a barely sub-sonic snow-ploughing retard on the flat section of a blue run next to a "slow-down" sign. That was fairly typical. The off-piste, when we finally got do some properly, was deserted and from our vantage point the piste looked like it was the pinch of an hourglass with multi-coloured sand rushing through it. Natalie likes this metaphor. Go me.

We did ski the Valluga. I was expecting dramatic, death-defying mogul hopping but it was incredibly tame. The most exhilarting bit was being yelled at by a mad Austrian Pisteur because, apparently, i don't know how to ride a T-Bar.

So, in summary, if you like fast slopes, fast food, fancy lifts, drinking (think Cardiff-style boozing), then please go to St Anton. i had a fun weekend, but i won't be going back any time soon.