Saving the Snow: responsible skiing

Mark Lynas suggests how you can do your bit to ensure that you can have your snow and ski on it too.

Committed but environmentally-aware skiers and snowboarders will be familiar with this conundrum: how can you continue to enjoy the thrill of the slopes, without jetting off around the world in search of fast-diminishing snow and thereby contributing further to global warming in the process? It's a tough one – but the choices you make are crucial. Get it right and there's a chance your kids might actually know what a pair of skis are for too. Get it wrong and the only snowboards they'll ever see will be in a museum.

Lecture over – almost. There's a good reason why, environmentally speaking, the way you get to your destination is probably much more important than what you do when you get there. Aircraft emissions are the fastest-growing contributor to global warming, and a single return flight to the US can contribute the same to the world's climate change burden as everything else you do in the entire year. And with that much guilt hanging over you, how could you possibly enjoy your stay on the pistes?

Enter the Alpine Snow Train. This isn't some kind of hair shirt-wearing eco-sacrifice: according to those in the know (and it's pretty much a word of mouth thing) it's a lot more entertaining than the alternatives. If you get to the Alps by Snow Train, you can ski or board with a pretty clear conscience: train travel is on average responsible for only a third of the pollution of air travel, and is also much cleaner than travelling by car (see Sidebar). And it's actually faster in a sense as well – if you let the Snow Train take the strain you can get eight days on the slopes out of one week.

It sounds mathematically impossible, but it's true. Typical ski-train travellers leave London on Friday night, and change onto a French sleeper train either in Paris or Calais, depending on whether they cross the Channel by Eurostar or by ferry. Arriving at Bourg St Maurice at 7.30 and hopping on a 40-minute transfer to resorts like Val d'Isere, one can be on the slopes by 9.30am Saturday morning. Returning trains don't leave until the following Saturday night, so counting Saturday to Saturday inclusive, there's your eight days out. Beat that, Easyjet.

And the consensus amongst boarders and skiers alike is that the snow train is "far more fun than flying". As one snowboarding regular told Geographical: "It's the first night of your holiday, so everyone's having a few beers in the bar carriage. We're all best friends by the time we get to Bourg." The only drawback is its increasing popularity. "Loads of people use it, so it's booked up miles in advance."

Even national newspapers have begun to take notice. As Lucinda Labes put it in the Daily Telegraph: "The train provides a far superior travel experience to the plane. With air travel, holidays begin on arrival. The flying – its harried clock-watching, check-in, queues, the long-term car park – is at best a limbo, at worst a hurdle. Not so when you journey by train. Hop aboard the ski train and that's when the fun begins."

France is undoubtedly the easiest destination, but Swiss resorts can also be reached overnight by taking the Eurostar to Brussels and changing onto a sleeper there. For the Italian Alps catch a Eurostar to Paris and then board a sleeper bound for Turin. Ski train services run right through the season, from December to mid April.

This all brings us to the tough question of where to actually head for. In France, Les Arcs won 'Resort of the Year' in the 2003 Golden Ski Awards. It's actually three different ski villages at different altitudes – Arc 1600, Arc 1800 and Arc 2000 – which together boast 200km of groomed runs and 62 lifts. Nearby Val d'Isere is the single most popular destination for British skiers and boarders. Jointly known with the neighbouring Tignes as 'L'Espace Killy' (after local hero Jean-Claude Killy, who swept the board of gold medals at the 1968 Winter Olympics), even experts say they never get bored there. If you fancy yourself as a pro, Val's Face de Bellevarde was the men's downhill run at the 1992 Olympics, whilst for afters Dick's Tea-Bar is one of the best-known discos in the Alps.

Also in France, Chamonix is the winter sports capital of the world – not just for skiers but for mountaineers too. Rather than being a single resort, it's a chain of ski areas strung out along a huge valley in the lee of Mont Blanc itself, which at 4,807 metres is western Europe's highest mountain. You can also get there by train from Paris, and local buses ply their way between the different slopes. Famous for its heavy traffic as much as its heavy weather, the Chamonix area also offers fabulous off-piste glacier skiing – though with the danger of crevasses guides are a must. Having said that, glaciers are now being closed during some parts of the summer because heavy surface sports use seems to aggravate the effects of warming temperatures and accelerate glacial retreat. The same is now true on many of the Swiss glaciers.

If you're into mountains, Switzerland easily rivals the best that France can offer. The Jungfrau area tops the list – the villages of Grindelwald, Wengen and Murren (both the latter are completely car-free) are easily reached by train from Interlaken, itself a popular spot with Brits. The main ski area is Kleine Scheidegg above Grindelwald, both in the shadow of the imposing north face of the Eiger. Morbid sightseers used to be able to spot the corpses of unfortunate mountaineers by telescope – the face has claimed the lives of dozens of climbers over the years. The whole mountain is tunnelled through by a railway, which at Jungfraujoch reaches Europe's highest station at 3,454 metres in altitude. With snowlines in retreat because of global warming, local tourist outfits are now marketing the area more as a hiking and mountaineering destination – a classic example of how economic diversification is essential in a changing climate.

Zermatt, on the other hand, has the reputation for being a bit snooty and chic. But Zermatt has something that no other mountain resort in the world can match – the Matterhorn. The Matterhorn is more than just a mountain: it's an icon. As soon as you step out of the railway station you can hardly take your eyes off it – a massive lopsided pyramid towering up at the head of the valley. The Zermatt area has the highest Alpine peaks outside France: Monte Rosa, which is also the Italian border, reaches 4,634m, whilst the Matterhorn itself is 4,477m in height. But again, because of soaring summertime temperatures, all the local glaciers are in retreat, and there are increasing concerns about permafrost-related slope instability and landslides – concerns heightened after the massive rockfalls which hit the Matterhorn itself in July 2003.

Perhaps more than anywhere else in Switzerland, and again due to its unrivalled setting, Zermatt is a tourist centre even outside the winter snowsports season. The views are unparalleled: the town itself is surrounded by pastures, throughout which are dotted ramshackle wooden barns – perfect foreground for that authentic chocolate-box picture. The whole place is car-free: all motorists have to leave their cars down the valley and complete their journey to Zermatt by train, helping to reduce local pollution as well as greenhouse gas emissions and advertising the advantages of car-free towns. In winter the skiing is world famous, and the snowboarding possibilities are good too: according to the Good Skiing and Snowboarding Guide 2003 Zermatt offers "stupendous possibilities for free-riding".

You can get some of the best views without even taking much exercise – a cablecar to Kleine Matterhorn ('Little Matterhorn') whizzes you up to 3,820 metres right from the town itself, from where you can expore ice caves or admire the huge Breithorn glacier that surges down the valley far below. If you're not experienced enough to chance the Matterhorn itself you can still wave goodbye to departing climbers at the Hornlihutte, at the base of the popular Hornli ridge. Meanwhile, Zermatt's apres-ski includes everything from champagne and oysters (or snails) in Elsie's bar by the church to dancing on beer barrels to 3am in the aptly-named Le Broken. Who said eco-friendly tourism was no fun?

Mark Lynas is a climate change specialist writer based in Oxford. His book 'High Tide: News from a Warming World' will be published by Flamingo in March 2004. www.marklynas.org