The helipad was little more than a flat patch of snow roped off between some parked cars and the hotel. The chopper didn’t inspire confidence, either: it was an ancient-looking craft, with a nearly 50-year-old fuselage and a crack in the bubble windshield. But this lawn dart, I was assured, was a gem — an Alouette III, the classic French mountain helicopter. After some perfunctory instruction by the mountain guide, we climbed aboard and belted in. Blades Cuisinarted the air. Seats shook. Two guys taking off their ski boots next to the helipad ducked for cover. Then we were hammering south into empty mountains.This was an April evening in the land of the midnight sun.
There’s an understanding among Scandinavia’s diehard skiers: when the weather turns warm, it’s time to finish off the season at the world’s northernmost ski resort. There, at Riksgransen, more than 130 miles above the Arctic Circle in Sweden, the skiing isn’t over until that midnight sun finally droops below the horizon.
“It’s become a bit of a legendary place for the Swedes,” explained Torkel Karoliussen, a champion Norwegian telemark skier who has visited Riksgransen more than a dozen times. “The season doesn’t really start until March, and it’s best in May, and you can ski under the midnight sun in June.”
It’s true: starting about May 10 each year, the lifts close at 4 p.m. — only to reopen (on weekends) from 10 p.m. until 1 a.m.
For those who travel to Riksgransen, the experience means more than some valedictory turns in late-season snow. For Scandinavia’s sporting diaspora — the ski pros and ski bums and mountain guides and backpackers and surfers who head their separate ways each autumn — it’s a chance to swap stories after the long winter, to see and be seen. And each mid-May the marquee names in northern Europe’s ski scene converge to compete in the Scandinavian Big Mountain Championships, as well. “There’s no alternative” for skiing left by then, Mr. Karoliussen said, “So you know you’ll find everybody there.” And there are two more allures: Riksgransen offers easy access to off-piste skiing, and some of the world’s cheapest helicopter skiing — a sport that usually might as well be snow polo, it’s so expensive.
I arrived in Riksgransen last April after skiing nearly 50 days for work around the globe. I was both anxious to celebrate spring and loath to hurry home to the green grass and the sailboats on the lake that signaled the end of an epic winter. This seemed the best place to drag my feet: many northern countries’ skiers haven’t affixed the final exclamation point to their winter until they’ve schussed, bragged, danced, drunk “wolf’s paw” and then regretted drinking it, under the bright 2 a.m. sun at Riksgransen.
Don’t come here expecting Vail-at-68-degrees-north. The resort, 650 miles north of Stockholm, is little more than a clutch of barn-red buildings huddled, herdlike, on the rumpled Arctic landscape — their color, one suspects, making them easier to find in the whiteout storms the place sometimes endures.
A century ago a railway was bulled through to haul valuable iron ore from Swedish mines to the ice-free port in Narvik, Norway. The border hamlet of Riksgransen (the name in Swedish means “state border”) appeared almost overnight as a customs stop. Even today train cars mounded with ore bang past throughout the day; skiers walk beneath a railroad underpass to get to the lowest chairlift. A road here wasn’t built until 1984. Still, this was where Sweden’s modern ski tourism began in the 1930s, said Robert Gustafsson, general manager of the hotels.
Riksgransen has just two of them. The smartest rooms are at the two-year-old, boutique-y Meteorologen Ski Lodge, a 14-room renovated weather station that’s the village’s oldest structure. Pretty much everyone else who’s not camping down by the lake in late spring stays at the large Hotel Riksgransen, next door to Meteorologen, its 170 rooms ranging from apartmentlike spaces to basement rooms smaller than a cruise-ship berth — rooms so small you can shower while sitting on the toilet. This is not an amenity.
The six-lift ski mountain itself is a fairly modest affair. Just 15 marked and groomed runs vein its broad, treeless pate. But skiers don’t schlep here for the pistes; more interesting are the ungroomed interstices between those groomed runs. Cliffy, rock-chipped faces like Branten are even labeled on the trail map. True to European tradition, on the hill these sometimes sketchy areas aren’t roped off, or even gated, but only marked with signs that say simply, “Lavin Fara” — “Avalanche Danger.”
One morning a Swedish friend and I took two chairlifts to the 2,982-foot mountaintop, pushed off on another off-piste run called Rimfors (the avalanche danger was low that day, and the slope well-compacted by other skiers) and immediately crossed over the invisible dashed line of the Norway-Sweden border.
Around us unrolled one of the more unusual views in ski-dom: a refrigerated, pale, polar blueness infused all — snow, sky. The landscape seemed the very reason a word like “wind-swept” was invented. Lapland’s shorn hills humped off toward the east. Only Arctic birches clung in the low places; this far north, the pines had surrendered long ago. This translates into no visibility on those not-infrequent days here when clouds stretch overhead, and sky and land become one.
“It’s a lovely place to be if it’s like this,” the girl pouring my cappuccino had said that morning, squinting at the sunshine outside, “but it’s either heaven or hell.”
Later, we donned our avalanche beacons and went exploring farther afield. (If skittish in the backcountry, skiers can pay to go with a group on half-day off-piste ski adventures and other backcountry tours.) While an ant train of skiers trekked up the nearby 3,448-foot Nordalsfjall to ski the classic run off its backside, we pushed away from the top lift into Norway again, on an abbreviated version of the Lilla Olturen, a k a the Little Beer Run. Skiers who time it right can enjoy a less-traveled powder run all the way down to a train station west of Riksgransen, and catch a short ride back to the resort. When the snow is good — and safe — these runs open up another world of skiing here.
When the ski day ends at Riksgransen, to paraphrase Henry Ford, you can go anywhere to kick back and après-ski as long as it’s to Gronan, or Green, a huge, dimly lit, green-walled, mostly underground bar that’s pretty much the resort’s only watering hole. Among young Scandinavian skiers, Gronan is something of a legend — the boozy weekend epicenter of late spring’s social scene. It has a long bar and $15 beers and smells a bit like a fraternity basement, and there are dark shades over its wall of windows, so that the 3 a.m. sunlight doesn’t throw the dedicated partiers off their game — rather the same way a windowless Vegas casino keeps the serious gamblers focused.
Unfortunately when I was in town on a weekend in late April, Gronan was uncharacteristically mellow and devoid of its famously caffeinated scene — which is to say it only kept us up and drinking one of its concoctions, vargtass, or wolf’s paw, a lethally innocuous-tasting drink of lingonberry and vodka — until we stumbled out into the lingering Arctic twilight at 2:15 a.m. “You should be here next week,” I was told, almost apologetically. “May 1st is like Sweden’s Labor Day.”
Throughout the next day, a helicopter swooped overhead like some out-of-season dragonfly. It settled less than a snowball’s toss from the hotel, disgorging five skiers and loading five more. In North America, heli-skiing can easily cost $800 a day; at Riksgransen skiers can sign up to taste as little as a single run of jet-fueled heaven, and pay accordingly. When the exchange rate is at all favorable, this may be the cheapest heli-skiing an American can enjoy, run for run, on the planet. The system is equally casual: leave a cellphone number at the reservation desk, and someone calls when it’s time to fly. Come late spring, the helicopter even lifts off at midnight (noise ordinances, apparently, being flexible).
We weren’t late enough in the season to try midnight heli-skiing. That evening around 6 p.m., however — while others settled into the hotel’s hot tub, or tossed back the first vargtass — we were finally summoned to the helipad for our three-run heli-ski package.
We piled in, with the guide and his dog. The Alouette shimmied. The red buildings shrank to little red Monopoly hotels beneath the struts. And in 10 minutes we were alone on a mountaintop.
The first run wasn’t epic; the Arctic sun had shone on the south-facing slope too much that day, and it became crispy as it refroze. But our guide, Krister Jonsson, made up for it the second time. The pilot landed on a rime-blasted summit the Sami people call Gorsacohkka, with views west all the way into the saltwater fjords of Norway. We chased Mr. Jonsson down a run called Timglaset — the Hourglass. The pitch was steep and fast and sun-sheltered, the snow smooth and dense. We threw ourselves down it with the abandon of knowing that a summer of rehab awaited, if needed.
The Hourglass didn’t punish, though. It may have been the most fun I’d had on skis all year. “We’re not going to get better than that one,” Mr. Jonsson announced. So we did it again, for our final run, as the sun spilled the last of its bowl of daylight across the slope.
At the bottom we all stood there for a few moments, breathing heavily and looking back at the tracks on the mountain, as if reading in them the good fortune of an entire winter.
OFF PISTE ABOVE THE ARCTIC CIRCLE
Riksgransen (46-980-400-80; www.riksgransen.nu) is more than 130 miles north of the Arctic Circle, in Lapland on the Sweden-Norway border. Most visitors arrive by flying into Kiruna, Sweden, then taking the train or a bus shuttle (less than two hours). A car isn’t necessary. There are also airports about 35 miles west, in both Narvik and Harstad/Evenes, Norway. Note: Many intra-Europe carriers now charge extra for skis.
A good Web site for train information and reservations from Sweden is www.bokatag.se. Bus transfer details on the Swedish side: www.ltnbd.se. For trains from Norway: www.nsb.no.
The season here is mid-February until the end of June. Easter weeks are always fully booked so plan at least six months in advance for those times. Midnight-sun skiing begins on weekends starting around May 10. Lift tickets cost 310 kronor ($36.21 at 8.56 kronor to the dollar). From about Easter through June the entire resort is often sold out on weekends.
Heli-skiing is offered in packages of one to three runs (the latter the most economical; 1,395 to 2,195 kronor).
WHERE TO STAY
The smartest rooms are at the two-year-old, 14-room Meteorologen Ski Lodge (46-73-503-24-17; www.meteorologen.se). Doubles range from 1,600 to 4,000 kronor per night, including breakfast.
The large Hotel Riksgransen, next door, has 170 rooms in a variety of sizes. The hotel also has a spa. Doubles range from 900 kronor, low season without breakfast, to 3,400 kronor with breakfast in high season.
WHERE TO EAT AND DRINK
For both après-ski and late-night partying, skiers pretty much have just one choice here: Gronan, in the basement of the Hotel Riksgransen. On sunny days, the bar has a deck outside.
What far exceeds expectation for a ski resort in the middle of nowhere is the food.
In its small farmhouse-like setting, Meteorologen’s 28-seat restaurant serves excellent modern Scandinavian fare like grilled reindeer leg medallions, accompanied by a 500-label wine list (many of the wines by the glass) overseen by Patrick Stromsten, Sweden’s 2001 Sommelier of the Year. Three-course dinner for two with wine pairings, about 1,700 kronor. Reservations recommended.
The Restaurant Lapplandia at the Hotel Riksgransen is slightly more modestly priced, but also very good, serving contemporary twists on regional dishes like an appetizer of moose carpaccio with Laphroiag and cloudberry-pickled shitakes, and entrees like grilled Arctic char with citrus gravy. A three-course dinner for two, with wine, about 1,000 kronor. There’s a changing nightly buffet (265 kronor).
credited to travel.nytimes.com
0 comments
Post a Comment