Words: Leslie Anthony 2017-12-11 21:14:31
The panorama crowding the rest of the parlor is equally striking. To the Eiger’s right lean the Mönch and Jungfrau, a mountainous thumb and forefinger pinching the icy start of Europe’s longest glacier, the Aletsch. This monolithic trio gives way to the massive wall of the Schwarzmönch, and below it, the great gash of waterfall-lined Trümmelbach Gorge. The view feels like a diorama of alpinism.
Indeed, Mürren is as redolent with human history as geologic. It first appears in records in the year 1257 as Dorf auf der Mauer, or “village on the wall.” The colonizing Walser people arrived by squeezing through the no-longer-negotiable Wetterlücke gap. Over the centuries, the isolated settlement was variously known as Montem Murren, Murron, Murn, Mürn, Murne, Myrrhen, and, finally, Mürren, which stuck when the ever-intrepid British discovered it as a summer destination in the 1840s.
In those years, wealthy pilgrims were carried to Mürren up rocky paths from the Lauterbrunnen valley on sedan chairs, until popularity demanded a cog railway be built. The Grand Palace Hotel (today the Alpin Palace), was erected in 1847, each room boasting spectacular views of the Eiger.
It wasn’t until 1910, with the region firmly entrenched as a climbing destination, that a savvy British tour operator convinced the railway owner to open the tracks in winter, promising to deliver snow tourists. The gambit worked, spawning a spate of hotel construction to accommodate growing numbers who came to take the air and slide around on sledges and newfangled objects from Norway called “skis.”
The sport-mad Brits believed this skiing held huge promise for tourism, and the resulting tradition of instruction and competition that evolved here brought shape to the sport, and a label to this budding travel sector: the ski resort.
There are other cradles of skiing: western China’s Altai, the Telemark region of Norway, and Austria, to name a few. But Mürren, where recreation, competition and infrastructure finally found footing together, can be considered the birthplace of modern ski civilization.
Behind the Hotel Eiger, a tram packed with skiers now rises to the 9,744-foot summit of the Schilthorn, where a chic revolving restaurant caps the structure. A few iconic scenes from the 1969 James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service were filmed here, and locals remain Bond-obsessed. In preparation for the film’s 50th anniversary in 2019, they’ve installed a mini-museum at the top of the Schilthorn.
Directly in front of the Hotel Eiger sits the cliff-hugging rail station that disgorges passengers who’ve taken a tram from Lauterbrunnen to ride the quaint wooden train over from Gimmelwald. All in-town conveyance in Mürren is via horse-drawn sled or electric vehicle, so golf-cart taxis wait outside to whisk arrivals over snowy roads and past outdoor curling rinks to their lodging.
Like a handful of other Swiss mountain villages, the streets of Mürren are never entirely cleared of snow during winter, merely tamped down so skiers can meander off the mountain and through the village to a favorite après bar without removing their gear, an alpine idyll that has lasted a century. Beside the train station stands the man most responsible for all of this. I’ve come a long way to see him, yet Sir Arnold Henry Moore Lunn—mountaineer, organizer, inventor, speed demon and perhaps the world’s most lyrical and prolific ski writer—says nothing when we meet.
Monuments are like that.
—W. James Riddell, after winning the 1929 Inferno downhill race.
I first visited the Jungfrau Region to retrace the steps of Sir Arnold and acolyte W. James Riddell, whose several books and collective works in British alpine ski journals paint them as the de facto fathers of modern ski journalism. As a ski and travel writer, I am their descendant, and had often wondered about this genealogy. The trail led me directly from the London offices of the Ski Club of Great Britain to the Bernese Oberland and eventually Mürren, where many of the pair’s writings were set. I’d long wanted to experience precisely what it was that had so inspired them.
I spent my first few days skiing the rolling slopes of Grindelwald, below the Eiger’s imposing north face, lunching at a breezy 6,760 feet in Kleine Scheidegg, Switzerland’s most storied mountain pass. Located between the Eiger and Lauberhorn, Kleine Scheidegg boasts hotels, restaurants and a station serving two cog railways—the Wengernalpbahn, built in 1893, and the Jungfraubahn, built in 1896. While the former is a straightforward route that connects Grindelwald with Lauterbrunnen and Mürren, the Jungfraubahn is a marvel of 19th-century engineering, climbing steeply through switchback tunnels inside the Eiger and Mönch to its 11,330-foot terminus at the Jungfraujoch, Europe’s highest rail station. Along the way you can stop to gaze out windows hacked into the Eiger’s north face, over the sea of ice that is the Aletsch Glacier. This experience alone was probably enough to captivate Lunn’s and Riddell’s imaginations, and they used this conveyance for many of the high-mountain ski tours they pioneered in the region.
In winter, Kleine Scheidegg becomes the pivot for both Grindelwald and Wengen ski areas, so it’s as simple as turning left or right off a chairlift to go from one to another. That made things easy when I wanted to catch the famed Lauberhorn World Cup Downhill, along with 60,000 other riotous fans. I watched the race from several places along its sinuous course, amazed, as always, by the speed and technical skill on display, but also enjoying the ambiance of a face-painted, flag-waving, schnapps-guzzling crowd so dense it stripped the mountainside of snow.
I moved to Mürren the next day to witness a stark contrast: the Inferno, the world’s oldest and largest amateur downhill race. Inaugurated by Arnold Lunn’s Kandahar Ski Club in 1928, the course drops some 8,500 vertical feet over nine miles. Early participants climbed three hours from Mürren on skis, spent the night in a hut, then climbed three more hours to the start gate the next morning. The first winner took 1 hour and 45 minutes to reach the valley; the next year, with a known route and more racers compacting the snow, a young James Riddell did it in 45 minutes. Today the fastest skier takes less than 15 minutes, and with one of 1,900 participants leaving the gate every 12 seconds, the race is a mix of pure madness and occasional carnage.
It’s also an institution and tradition among Brits, who arrive by the hundreds to support friends or family entering the nefarious competition. Leading up to the race, Lycra suits are legion in Mürren’s streets and bars, and every ski shop has a stash of ex-World Cup downhill skis for rent. The night before the gun goes off, a crazed parade of torch bearers, creepily costumed marching bands and an enormous devil’s head snake through the extensively decorated streets. It stops at the magnificent Alpin Palace, where speeches are given, starting numbers drawn and livers trashed. The following night is even wilder.
Being both cheerleaders and chroniclers of skiing’s early days as a competitive sport and holiday industry, I wonder whether Riddell and Lunn would have been shocked by what the Inferno—or their beloved Mürren—had become.
More likely they’d be amused, and offering an “I-told-you-so” or two.
—Arnold Lunn, The Mountains of Youth, 1925
Arnold Lunn was born in 1888 in Madras, India. His father, Henry Lunn, was a travel-addicted Methodist minister, and introduced young Arnold to skis on a trip to Chamonix, France, in 1896. Although a climber in the staunchest of British traditions, Arnold would find more fame as a renowned skier. Founding the Alpine Ski Club in 1908, the Ladies Ski Club in 1923, and the Kandahar Ski Club in 1924, he also is credited with inventing the slalom and helping organize some of the world’s most prestigious ski races. Collaborating with Austrian ski pioneer Hannes Schneider, he initiated the Arlberg Kandahar Challenge Cup in honor of Lord Roberts of Kandahar.
As a longstanding member of the FIS, Arnold’s greatest accomplishment was arguing for and introducing both Downhill and Slalom (a word he coined for the race he invented at Mürren in 1922, featuring shorter, sharper turns through gates) into the 1936 Winter Olympics at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. Beginning in 1907, he also wrote copious books and articles documenting this developing culture, which he was helping to create. And he was wildly successful, so much so that in 1952 he was knighted for “services to British Skiing and Anglo-Swiss relations.”
Like Lunn, Riddell translated his talents on the slopes, concocting his own elegant record of the times. In 1929, the same year he won the Mürren Inferno, he also raced for Britain in the first international Downhill at Zakopane, Poland, finishing eighth among 60 racers. A true renaissance man, in 1930 he skied at almost 80 mph in the famed Chilometro Lanciato (“flying kilometer”) at St. Moritz, and vaulted nearly 164 feet off its Olympic jump. He was British national skiing champ in 1935 and vice captain to Lunn’s son, Peter, at the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Along with racing, he worked alongside Arnold and the Kandahar Club to overcome Scandinavian objections to alpine-only ski events.
Unfortunately, during the downhill race Riddell hit a tree and catapulted into a river, severely injuring his back. President of the Ski Club of Great Britain, Kandahar Club and Alpine Ski Club in postwar years, he was awarded both the Perry Medal and Arnold Lunn Medal for his career as writer and traveler. In Ski Holidays in The Alps, a guidebook written by he and his wife, Riddell explained his ski addiction: “You do it because, once you have tried it and taken to it, there isn’t any other game to compare with it in the world.”
Riddell was right, of course. And given the rarified situation of Mürren, it’s no wonder he and the Lunn family saw fit to base themselves here. Over the years, they helped work out many of the details—and problems—in bringing recreational and competitive skiing to the masses. Beyond that, the village where the modern ski resort was born hasn’t changed much since. The clientele is mostly those who return annually, and many are Brits. In fact, it was in large part because Lunn and Riddell’s influence on British ski culture that Mürren became the location for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. And why Bond mania reigns supreme with the locals.
—Peter Lunn, High-Speed Skiing, 1935
Before I arrived, I’d been told by a tourist bureau friend that Peter Lunn still spent four weeks a winter at the Hotel Eiger, as his London-based family had for almost a century. Peter had followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming a renowned ski racer and author in his own right. By this time, he was 96 years old, and I hoped to bump into him shuffling around some hotel lobby. Maybe we’d have a chat about the early days—perhaps tea in the Eiger’s lounge? So far, however, there’d been no sign of his presence.
On the day before the Inferno, I’d just finished a glorious off-piste powder run in the resort’s amphitheater-like Sonnenberg sector when a smallish man, hunched with intense concentration, his face sprung with an ivory tuft of chin whiskers, snowplowed past me on a cat road. It was Peter being escorted under the watchful eyes of his son Stephen and his daughter-in-law. I was awestruck, but perhaps should not have been—at age 90 Peter had become the oldest person ever to ski the Inferno, a record likely to stand in perpetuity. The family pulled up at a restaurant for coffee, where I found them sitting on the sunny deck watching “speed fliers” whirl over the face of the Schilthorn. It was pure invention and mountain art, and a moment of shared awe that tied together everything I’d hoped to find here.
Introduced to Peter by his son, I carefully grasped the hand that stretched slowly toward me. When I told him I had read his 1935 book High-Speed Skiing cover to cover, he became animated with delight. Not wanting to burden him unnecessarily, I asked what I thought to be a simple question: what attracted him to the sport in the first place?
Peter looked up with a wan smile and distant eyes, his thoughts possibly hitching back to the apt title of one of his father’s books The Mountains of Youth. Over the years I’d found a few answers as to why people chucked everything to go skiing. Or bothered to write about it. But only that simple question could account for the sport’s constant evolution, its past, present and future, something in which Mürren—and Arnold Lunn and James Riddell—had played a significant role.
“It was fun,” Peter answered, his grin widening. “Just so much fun.”
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