My Slopes: Vail

An international resort of town-sized dimensions, Bad Gastein in the Hohe Tauern mountains has a long history of tourism pre-dating winter sports by many centuries. Today it is a town of grand appearance with classically designed hotels with shades of white and pale yellow cutting up in to the skyline. The town grew up, as its name might suggest, on 17 natural healing thermal springs which still rise directly beneath it as they have for the past 3000 years. After a hard day skiing the 250km (170 miles) of trails on the Gastein Valley Pass it's possible to bathe in the open air in the rock swimming pool complex filled by the hot natural springs. Bad Gastein's spa treatments were recognised as far back as the 13th century, but its skiing potential only came to light in the 1950s after the first cable car in Austria was opened here in 1950 and the Ski World Cup of 1958 subsequently drew further attention. However the resort remains as famous for its curative abilities as it does for its winter sports facilities, with the healing powers of the Gastein Thermal Gallery particularly highly praised. This was created by miners digging for gold who discovered that, despite the hard work, their rheumatic pains were getting less, not greater. The sense of the importance of water to Bad Gastein - be it bubbling up through the rocks below or turned to snow on the mountains above, is everywhere, and emphasised most visibly perhaps by the spectacular waterfall that cascades down by the town.

Scotland's best known ski area is 10 miles (16km) east of the lively village of Aviemore. There have been dramatic improvements here in recent years and a vast array of non-ski activities are now available to counter the traditional problem - unpredictable weather. The resort boomed in the 1960s when the 'Aviemore Centre' a complex of unattractive rectangular hotels and apartments was built, rapidly deteriorating in to an eyesore during the 1970s and 80s and bringing the image of the rest of Aviemore down with it. Subsequent face lifts and new leisure and accommodation options which have developed around the resort and over the past three years or so has sidelined the Aviemore Centre and Aviemore today is very much a 'reborn' resort. The old Centre is now called "Aviemore Highland Resort" (AHR) The long planned new funicular railway which opened in 2001 provides a more modern, comfortable and reliable method of transportation than the former Car Park and White Lady Chairlifts. The funicular is almost two kilometres(1.2 miles) long and climbs to a height of 1097m (3600ft) taking approximately six minutes to reach the top (slowed down in summer to allow visitors time to take in the scenery). Replacing the Ptarmigan Café is a modern, panoramic restaurant, visitor exhibition and shop. With the completion of the funicular fewer skier days will be lost due to poor weather. Cairngorm's first chairlift was installed in 1961 and since then the facilities have increased so that there are now 13 of the 17 original lifts and tows providing an uplift capacity of some 8042 skiers per hour enjoying 40km of ski runs which extend into 2 adjoining corries, Coire Cas and Coire na Ciste. Some of the original uplift is not used now due to the increased capacity of the Funicular Railway. The old gaelic name for the Cairngorm Mountains is "Monadh Ruadh" meaning red mountains - you can see why on a fine summer evening in Aviemore as the setting sun seems to cast a red glow over the pink granite rock of the Cairngorms. After Ben Nevis, the Cairngorm Range of mountains have the highest peaks in the UK with Cairngorm itself being the 5th highest at 1245m (4084 ft.) As well as being popular with skiers, climbers and walkers the Cairngorms have an impressive range of environmental and scientific credentials. The area is home to the UK's largest National Nature Reserve and Europe's largest privately owned bird reserve. Scotland's largest National Park, Cairngorms National Park, (Pairc Naiseanta A' Mhonaidh Ruaidh) was established here in September 2003. It is the home to a unique and special place, 17,000 people and 25% of Britain's threatened birds, animals and plants. It includes moorlands, forests, lochs and glens. It has also been proposed as a World Heritage Site for its outstanding geological and geomorphologic features. As such it is considered to be one of the UK's best examples of sub-arctic habitat and is home to some of the UK's rarest birds and plants, including snow bunting, dotterel, ptarmigan and the famous Ospreys which breed at nearby Loch Garten.

Lake Tahoe is one of the world's leading ski regions, centred on one of the biggest Alpine Lakes on the planet with a great snowfall and snow quality record. There are 13 ski areas to choose from (more if you travel a few miles further out) - each with their unique character and selling points. The best known are Heavenly (now owned by Vail resorts), at the south end of the lake with bases in both Nevada and California and Squaw Valley USA at the north end, which is a former host to the Winter Olympics and has added a new base village in recent years. Other well known resorts include Northstar, which has recently expanded dramatically and also added a new base village; Kirkwood - also with a new base village; Alpine Meadows and Sierra-at-Tahoe. The remaining choices are Sugar Bowl - another rapidly expanding ski area; Diamond Peak; Mt Rose; Tahoe Donner; Boreal; Soda Springs and Donner Ski Ranch. During winter, weather systems from the nearby Pacific are carried north via the Polar Jet Stream to the Gulf of Alaska where they cool before heading south and tracking towards Lake Tahoe. When the weather systems meet with the Sierra Nevada mountains they cool rapidly and the moisture condenses to produce more than 500 inches of snow annually. Most of the mountains top 10,000 ft which produces even lighter powder. The area is renowned not only for its winter activities but also for its diverse entertainment options off the slopes. These include gourmet dining, shopping, gambling and live performances by some of the world's top entertainers. Vast amounts of money have been and continue to be spent on constant improvement of this ski area giant. The total value of recent spending adds up to over $1 billion. These include quarter-of-a-million dollar spends at each of Heavenlyt Kirkwood and Squaw. Heavenly is unique because it exists in two US States, with just over half of its lifts in California, the remainder in Nevada. It can also claim to have the biggest vertical on the western coast of the United States, the biggest ski area in California (and the second biggest in North America) and the highest skiing in the famous Tahoe region. More important than the numbers though is the stunning scenery as you look down on Lake Tahoe, one of North America's largest alpine lakes, and for many visitors the availability of Tahoe's legendary '24 hour nightlife' once they're off the slopes. It was the view, and the 'heavenly relief' of the warm air rising, that lead settlers in the 1800s (arriving in the area from the backside of Heavenly rather than the Tahoe side), to give the area its name. A century later, the name 'Heavenly ' fortunately turned out to be a marketing man's dream. Another of North America and the world's major resorts, Squaw Valley 's history dates back to the late 1940's when the resort's first chairlift was installed. A little over a decade later the resort's meteoric rise saw it hosting the 1960 Winter Olympics. With more than 30 lifts, including North America's first Funitel, serving 4000 skiable acres Squaw is definitely a world class resort. The ski-in and ski-out lodging property, the Resort at Squaw Creek, opened in the early 1990s. Still family owned, Squaw is sensibly following the trend in North America's top resorts and has extended its existing slopeside lodging to create a state-of-the-art $250 million resort village, in partnership with the best in the business, Intrawest. It incorporates over 80 shops and restaurants as well as more than 700 condos. The resort's move into the 21st century has been boosted by the $20 million investment in a new Funitel. This is a combined gondola-funicular system with 46, 28 person cabins capable of transporting 3000 skiers per hour in winds which had, on occasion, caused the resort to suspend operations of older lifts on the higher slopes. The ascent time has also been cut from 12 to 8 minutes. The resort's achievement in hosting the 1960s Olympics is still a topic of conversation more than forty years on. It wasn't just that the area succeeded in staging what was then the world's largest games, with a thousand competitors from 34 nations, a little over a decade after Squaw's inception, but that the resort actually won the bidding five years earlier, in 1955, when it was virtually unheard of outside California. Northstar is one of Lake Tahoe's bigger resorts, thanks to a gradual expansion over the past 30 years. It's owned by the Booth Creek Group who also owns sister resort, Sierra-at-Tahoe, along with four more elsewhere in the US. Northstar has a fast, efficient lift system and an intimate, friendly feel. In the midst of an exciting Renaissance, Northstar is in the process of developing a 'mountain village' at its base, with up-market ski-in, ski-out condominiums, shops, restaurants and they hope a lively après ski scene. The six main Ski Lake Tahoe resorts (Alpine Meadows, Heavenly, Kirkwood, Northstar-at-Tahoe, Sierra-at-Tahoe and Squaw Valley USA) are available on one pass for guests planning to stay a week or more. There are two variants - the 'Domestic interchangable' for North American residents who can purchase a 5 out of 6 day, a 6 out of 7 day, an 8 out of 10 day or a 10 out of 13 day ticket at most of the ticket windows of the resorts on the Pass. The second option, for non-North American residents, is the International Interchangable which is only offered through tour operators and travel agents. The Pass covers the 100 lifts offered by all the resorts combined, and one British tour operator believes that the total skiable terrain offered on the pass works out at nearly 800km or 500 miles, which if correct would make it the world's fourth largest area covered by one lift ticket, after the French Savoy Olympic Pass, and the Italian Dolomiti Superski and Aosta Valley passes. Unfortunately no accurate comparison is possible as some of the Tahoe resorts only follow the North American norm of measuring the area of their skiable terrain in acres, rather than the total length of the ski runs - the norm elsewhere in the world. What's not doubted is that the total skiable terrain is 17000 acres, the largest individual area offered by Heavenly with 4800 acres, with Squaw not far behind with 4500 acres. The lifts include numerous high speed chairs, cable cars (or 'aerial trams') and gondolas.