Switzerland 

                                      Spotlight On Saas-Fee

                                                                      (Originally written for OnTheSnow.com)
                                                                                           by Ted Heck)

Yogi Berra is credited with the advice that “when you come to a Y in the road, take it.” Maybe he was thinking of the village of Stalden, a junction in southern Switzerland. Go right and you end up in Zermatt; go left to Saas-Fee, whose slogan is “The Pearl of the Alps.”

You are a winner on either route. The right canyon leads to the Matterhorn, the left to a village that also has stunning scenery and the Dom, a peak 200 feet higher than the Matterhorn, but flat topped. In Zermatt you have to ride a train or aerial conveyance to get a close look at one of the glaciers. In Saas-Fee it can be as close as across the meadow from your hotel, where an awesome glacier looks ready to swallow the village.

To ride up over non-skiable sections of the glacier is an exercise in imagination. Does that massive fissure really reach down to China? Does that snow and ice formation sculpted by nature look like Winston Churchill smoking a cigar?

Skiable parts of the glacier include a smooth ballroom, perhaps too timid for hotshots, but a delight for intermediates. Yet there are plenty of opportunities for the truly adventurous, especially on unprepared slopes like the demanding “White Pearl.”

As you work up the mountain, a subway ride on the Metro Alpin deposits you at the world’s highest revolving restaurant and the largest ice pavilion on earth. The restaurant is somewhat more exciting than the one atop the Holiday Inn in Baltimore. During lunch you can look out at the steeper slopes of the summer skiing area. In the distance you might see a string of backcountry skiers plodding up toward the Dom on the first leg of a week-long High Route adventure to Chamonix in France.

Saas-Fee actually has four skiable mountains, with 62 miles of downhill and 10 miles of cross country trails, split between classic and skating tracks. In addition to the skiing, the resort can boast of great ice climbing possibilities, snowshoeing, and sledding.

The village itself is a blend of modern hotels and centuries-old, weathered farm buildings. Narrow streets, like those in Zermatt, are traffic-free. You have to park the car on the edge of town. It is a village that exudes so much charm you’ll want to yodel.

I have an off-beat memory of the village. One night a group of us had a long dinner of raclette, the Swiss gustatory treat in which you eat plate after plate of melted cheese as it is scraped from a wheel spinning over a fire. Consuming local fendant wine is part of the ritual.

At a disco later a young woman in our party shrieked that she had lost her pearls. Armed with flashlights, several of us retraced our steps to the restaurant, swinging our torches back and forth across the snow-covered street.

“Was machen Sie?” (What are you doing?) asked some Swiss revelers. Looking for pearls, I told them in German. They waved us off impatiently, probably thinking we were making a pun on The Pearl of the Alps. Of course, we never found the pearls.

Saas-Fee and neighboring villages of Saas-Grund and Saas-Almagell are less expensive than Zermatt. Yogi Berra would call them alternative option choices.

Saas-Fee is about four hours from the Geneva gateway.