Under the Matterhorn’s Spell : A weeklong skier’s holiday in Zermatt, Switzerland, is inspiring and gloriously different. The surprise is that it can cost as little as a ski vacation in the Rockies.

Skis and poles over my shoulder, I clomped along the narrow street alongside the rushing Visp river from the gondola station down toward the center of Zermatt. The Matterhorn brooded behind and far above me, its east and north faces in frigid shadow framed in the twilight that was slipping quickly into Italy and France. Evening had fallen on the village. But a mile and a half above Zermatt’s narrow, auto-free streets, a brilliant alpenglow set fire to the jagged summits of the Taschhorn and the Dom.

French horn music floated from a nearby condo. High-schoolers laughed and shouted as they whacked a hockey puck around the town rink. The church bell rang 5 o’clock as I turned from Kirchstrasse onto Zermatt’s main street, Bahnhofstrasse, with its hotels, sports shops, banks, boutiques and--new since we were here in May of 1990--its McDonald’s.

This is a busy time of day in the heart of Zermatt. The streets are filled with skiers, schoolchildren, shoppers clutching their bags or window-shoppers gazing at goods yet unbought. The quiet little electric taxis beep for passage. Mothers with bundled infants in strollers pass by, often accompanied by the family dogs, which roam at will. In Zermatt, both infants and canines are held in special affection.

There was no snow in this narrow valley, a mere 5,315 feet in elevation, but the temperature sign on the bank read “-3” (that’s Celsius--which translates to about 27 degrees Fahrenheit). No problem. I was still glowing inside from the Coffee Furri--a drink of coffee spiked with some fire-stoking additive--I’d sipped at Restaurant Furri, a popular lunch and after-ski spot near the transfer station for the big tram linking the slopes to the gondola coming up from Zermatt.

Around noontime that day, a Wednesday, my non-skiing wife Anne and I had taken an eye-bulging sightseeing flight in one of Air Zermatt’s five Swiss-red helicopters. We’d hovered literally feet over the brilliant turquoise glacial ice of the peaks that flank the north side of the Mattertal ( tal means valley)--the Weisshorn, Zinalrothorn and Ober Gabelhorn. These are big peaks, celebrated in mountaineering annals along with their counterparts on the other side of the valley, the Breithorn, Monte Rosa and Dom. In any other place, any one of these stunning mountains would be the dominating local trademark. But here in Zermatt, of course, the defining peak, symbolizing not just this town but Switzerland itself, is the Matterhorn--around whose 14,692-foot summit our helicopter had swept at virtual arm’s length.

*

Back in our room at the Hotel Alex after our flight, Anne said, “You should go skiing.”

Sure, but it was already 1 p.m. I’d have to change. It would take an hour or more to get up to the slopes. I thought of the fire in the fireplace, and imagined a nap curled up in the fluffy down duvet that serves as sheet, blanket and comforter on every hotel bed in Switzerland.

“Go,” she said again. I went.

It only took me 45 minutes to make the trip to the start of the Zermatt region’s loftiest ski run, beginning just below the 12,533-foot summit of the Klein Matterhorn (Little Matterhorn), the highest ski-tram terminus in Europe. From here, there was nowhere to go but down. I skied along endlessly wide boulevards of velvet snow that squeaked softly beneath my skis in the near-zero cold. I was all but alone at times. Empty slopes stretched out as much as a half-mile in front of me, and behind. I made two more runs from T-bar lifts and then took the tram and gondola back to Zermatt. I’d had barely two hours of actual skiing--just three “runs” as we think of them. But they added up to some six miles and nearly 9,000 feet of descent.

That evening, Anne and I went to our table in the basement dining room of the Hotel Alex, where carved-wood panels flank stunning stained-glass murals of mountaineering scenes. We had what we quickly became accustomed to: another superb supper. This evening it was cream of tomato soup with gin and basil, filet of John Dory, salad, veal breaded with hazelnuts and Bavarian pear cream with raspberry sauce. Coffee and cognac put the cap on what had to be as close as you could come to a perfect skiing day in the Alps.

But Thursday turned out to be as good, if not better. Up near the Klein Matterhorn, I turned left into Italy and discovered a whole new white wilderness of stunning mountain peaks and miles of virtually empty ski runs.

In just those two days, I skied over an area of 25 to 30 square miles, on some 10 feet of snow laying atop glaciers hundreds of feet deep, far above tree line. And this was in just one of Zermatt’s three major ski areas--an area that wasn’t even completely open yet.

In a recent issue of a popular ski magazine, the newly enlarged Aspen, Colo., ski area, boasting that “Big is Good,” advertised that it now has 4,093 acres of ski slopes served by 41 lifts. The region I’d skied here in just those two days could swallow up four Aspens. When winter is in full swing, Zermatt has 143 miles of downhill runs, a total vertical drop of more than 7,000 feet (the U.S. maximum is 4,139 feet at Jackson Hole, Wyo.), 73 lifts and 36 on-slope restaurants.

The link to the adjacent region above Cervinia, Italy, where I ended up on Thursday, adds scores more square miles of easily accessible skiing, with 119 miles of groomed runs and 28 lifts. Cervinia, in turn, is linked to the ski runs of the Valtournache--and many more restaurants with a whole different cuisine.

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That’s fine, the American skeptic might say--but who can afford it? Skiing the Swiss Alps is for the rich--the jet set. But the surprising truth is that, on a package deal, Americans can ski the Alps for not that much more than they’d pay for most comparable packages in Aspen or Vail or Jackson Hole.

The average price of a one-week January ski package from Los Angeles to Vail, booked through the tour adjuncts of Delta, United or Continental Airlines, is about $1,250 per person, double occupancy, including air travel, seven nights lodging, six days of ski lift tickets and a rental car.

But Delta Airlines also offers a rate of $1,200 per person, double occupancy, for a January ski week in Interlaken, Switzerland, (about 45 miles north of Zermatt) including round-trip air fare from Los Angeles, seven nights at a two-star hotel, full breakfast daily and ground transport between Zurich and the hotel. (Ski lift passes are not included; these cost about $44 a day or $202 for six days.)

And for about $300 more than a week in Vail, you can enjoy Zermatt, with three-star accommodations and plenty of extras. Swissair’s “Matterhorn Ski Week” packages in Zermatt (available through Dec. 18, for the whole month of January and from April 16 through 23), for instance, include standard accommodations in a three-star hotel, breakfast and dinner (with tips already included in the bill), six days of ski passes and ski lessons, ground transport to the hotel from Geneva or Zurich airport and optional participation in a giant slalom race for a trophy, all for $760, including tax and service but exclusive of air fare. Add advance-purchase restricted air fare to that ($768 midweek, $818 weekend), and the total is $1528 to $1578. And you won’t need a rental car; you can’t drive a rental car into Zermatt.

A package price doesn’t tell the whole story, of course. Even in the midst of its own recession, and with currency-exchange rates favorable to Americans, Europe is expensive--and Switzerland is among the most expensive countries of all. Extras can run up the tab very quickly. Our helicopter trip, for example, cost us $120 each. A Sidney Sheldon paperback novel in English is $12 in a local bookstore. One-hour processing and printing of a 24-exposure roll of film runs $20. The morning’s International Herald Tribune costs $2.

Food and drink seem expensive, at first, but aren’t quite so bad if you remember that menu prices include tax and service. At Restaurant Furri, I had a lunch of rosti (the delicious Swiss version of hashed brown potatoes) and bratwurst for $9.65 and a beer for $2.50. Fendent, a good white wine from the nearby Swiss Rhone Valley, is $2 a glass. Subtracting a 15% tip brings the effective cost of the lunch to $10.

Ski-lift prices are comparable to those in the U.S., and sometimes a bit cheaper. A daily pass in the Zermatt area is usually about $36, and the cost of a week’s pass averages out at $24 a day. Lessons tend to be less expensive than in America.

Of course, if you go to Colorado, you don’t have to worry about skiing under the influence of jet lag from an 11-hour overnight flight from L.A. (followed by a 3 1/2-hour train ride from Geneva to Zermatt). You might also run into bad weather once you get there--though that’s a gamble wherever you ski.

But how do you put a price on the charm and atmosphere of staying in a centuries-old Alpine village instead of a modern-day condo village? And how do you describe the joys of Alpine skiing?

One veteran Alpine addict, mountaineer and author Lito Tejada-Flores of Telluride, Colo., says of skiing the Alps, “It’s just this big white paradise.”

Big, indeed. And it can be intimidating.

*

We arrived in Zermatt on a Friday in mid-November and I went skiing on Saturday for the first time without knowing just where I was going. The ski-area maps cover such a vast region that they provide only a vague guide to trails. I took a variety of lifts with some trepidation about getting myself into terrain that was above my intermediate skiing level.

The T-bar and poma lifts, called “drag lifts” here, seem archaic to Americans accustomed to modern chairlifts, and it is in the lift lines that you can encounter the storied horrors of Alpine skiing--the seeming rudeness of Europeans as they crush themselves into queues that creep like giant, formless centipedes.

This happened to me on Sunday, after masses of German ski club members had descended on Zermatt. There are no lift attendants politely shunting skiers into line, and a gaggle of humanity perhaps 20 bodies wide had to force itself into a turnstile that admits just one skier at a time. There was no choice but to push and shove.

Uh oh, I thought. Will every day be like this? Thankfully, Sunday was the exception. Strong winds that day had closed the 100-person Klein Matterhorn tram and the two new chairlifts on the Theodul glacier, so everyone had descended onto the same three T-bars.

The rest of the week was cold, but clear and virtually windless. All the lifts worked and lines were short or nonexistent. The sky was so clear you could see from Mt. Blanc in France to the Eiger and Jungfrau on the other side of the Rhone.

I later asked Amade Perrig, director of tourism and recreation for the Zermatt area, about the seemingly ancient and inefficient T-bar lifts. Chairlifts cannot be built on the glacier because of the constant movement of the ice, he replied. In fact, the T-bars have to be relocated once or twice a year. But they have an advantage: They can operate on windy days when other lifts are shut down.

A definite advantage of the Alps for expert skiers, or for those less-than-expert skiers who can afford a guide, is an almost endless expanse of virgin off-piste skiing, away from the established runs. But contrary to American perceptions, there are miles and miles of established runs that are groomed just as finely as those in the United States.

In my own admittedly limited experience, in fact, the runs here seem to remain better-groomed throughout the day than they do in the U.S. They are so much wider than American trails that skiers don’t follow the same tracks run after run. Thus the trails don’t get as chewed up and rutted as the day progresses.

Another advantage of the Swiss slopes is that the runs are usually much longer. “Very often,” says Tejada-Flores, “you’ll make just two or three runs a day. There are bigger mountains and higher altitudes. It’s quite different than the yo-yo style of skiing we have in the States.

“The real reason people ought to go to the Alps,” he continues, “is to experience a different kind of skiing. One dimension is the cultural difference, the different valleys, the different architecture, the different people, the different food.”

Perrig, who spent two years consulting for California’s Mammoth Mountain and Lake Tahoe resorts and who married a Californian, compares Swiss and American ski resorts in another way: “The American resorts do a great job of grooming,” he says. “The trails are very well-marked. It’s great skiing. It’s fun. Here we have a totally different philosophy. Nature here gives you a totally different perspective.”

The typical Western U.S. ski area was developed within boundaries established by its lease from federal land managers, “like a sports arena,” Perrig adds. In Zermatt, skiing grew up and out from the village in all directions as technology allowed and skiing grew in popularity.

“Here,” says Perrig, “it is not possible to put a boundary around it.”

GUIDEBOOK

The Zermatt File

Getting there: For those opting not to use one of the many package deals available: Swissair offers nonstop flights from Los Angeles to Geneva twice a week, and to Zurich four times a week. Round-trip fares to either city begin at $768. United, Delta and American all offer connecting flights to Geneva and/or Zurich. A typical fare is United’s minimum $886 round trip to Geneva via Paris. There is frequent connecting rail service from both cities to Zermatt. Round-trip rail fares for the 3 1/2-hour trip from Geneva are about $200 first-class, $120 second-class; the journey from Zurich takes about 4 1/2 hours and costs about $220 and $135, respectively.

Another way to reach Zermatt is via Milan. Alitalia flies nonstop daily from Los Angeles to that city, beginning at $768. There is train service from Milan to Zermatt, via Brig, but it is less frequent than from Geneva or Zurich. Round-trip fares are about $120 first-class and $70 second-class.

Where to stay: For those not booking full packages, there are ground-only packages available, typically covering land transfers and sometimes certain meals, as well as accommodations. A seven-night package offered by Swisspak, the Swissair travel subsidiary, for instance, ranges from $538 for a standard room with bath in Zermatt’s Europe Hotel, to $1,169 for a superior room in the five-star Zermatterhof--both prices per person, double occupancy, including land travel and some meals. For more information, call Swisspak at (800) 688-7947. We aarrived early in the season, when many hotels included in package deals were not yet open, and booked ourselves into the four-star Hotel Alex; tel. 011-41-28-671-726, fax 011-41-28-671-943. This is a modern, well-staffed hotel with an excellent dining room--and perhaps the finest indoor swimming pool I’ve ever seen. Rates: $87-$267 per night, per person, double occupancy, including breakfast and dinner.

Where to eat: The region is full of restaurants in every category. Some of the best ones are hotel dining rooms--but, for midday repasts, there are also some 36 eating places on the slopes around Zermatt alone. For lunch, we particularly enjoyed the Restaurant Furri; lunches $10 to $15, including wine or beer; tel. 011-41-28-672-477.

For more information: Call the Swiss National Tourist Office, 222 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Suite 1570, El Segundo 90245 (tel. 310-335-5980) for a free “Winter Switzerland 1993-1994” brochure detailing all ski packages from U.S.-based operators. The tourist office also offers guides to hotels and major ski resorts. Information can also be obtained from the Zermatt Tourist Office; tel. 011-41-28-674-641 or fax 011-41-28-661-185.