Winter's last gasp

Chris Gill relishes a late dollop of heavy snow on the Silvretta ski area

I like my skiing wintery. Skiing in shirtsleeves on snow that is veering to slush is not my idea of how it should be. So when I go skiing in late March, although I'm prepared for spring-like conditions, I'm hoping for a late burst of winter. This year, I haven't been disappointed.

A week ago, I spent the day skiing the Silvretta ski area shared by Ischgl in Austria and Samnaun in Switzerland. Snow fell practically all day, accompanied by strong and cold winds at altitude. This was winter, and no mistake. We were grateful to find that two of the main top chair-lifts are among the few in the Alps to be equipped with enclosing windshields. Towards the end of the afternoon, the one taking us back up to the Swiss border was running at snail's pace and was occasionally stopped altogether because of the wind.

The area is one of Austria's best for those who like extensive skiing and the good snow conditions that go with high altitude. Ischgl itself is high by Austrian standards at 1,400m. But most people spend their days skiing above and below the huge conglomeration of lift stations and restaurants at Idalp, at 2,310m. With a top height of 2,870m, you're getting the same kind of altitude that Obergurgl is famous for, but with much, much more skiing to do.

We tackled the area, as the textbooks say you should (but I never had), from Samnaun - a small village in a tight valley, all but cut off from the rest of Switzerland. The advantage of starting from there is that you're not travelling around the ski area along with the hordes of skiers starting from Ischgl, which is not only much bigger but also much more accessible to day-trippers and weekenders from Munich and other German centres of population. The trick seemed to work. We strolled on to the cable-car out of Ravaisch, down the road from Samnaun itself, but by the time we got to the border ridge skiers were streaming across from the Austrian side in huge numbers.

This one-way circulation of skiers has in the past led to some serious queues on the Swiss side of the area in the afternoon. To a degree, these have been solved by a new chair-lift up from the Swiss mid-mountain area of Alp Trida to the border. At present, getting out of the Samnaun valley bottom can be a problem in the afternoon; the cable-car is a big one, but not big enough. That problem should be solved next winter when Samnaun will open the world's biggest cable-car - a double-decker 180-person monster leading directly up to the Austrian border.

In the heavy snow, we abandoned plans to try to get around the whole area, and settled for a fairly thorough exploration of the skiing around the Palinkopf, at the south-west extremity of the area. On its north-east side, the Hollenkar bowl was excellent intermediate skiing - genuine reds on the higher drags, giving way to cruising blue terrain lower down.

A short drag took us up to the area's star restaurant for connoisseurs of woody ambience - the Paznauner Taya, reputedly shipped here log by log from the other end of Austria, and a splendid place for a long lunch on a day like last Saturday.

Sadly, our guide had other ideas for the afternoon, starting with exploration of the north-facing slopes of the Palinkopf, immediately above the restaurant. The black slopes at the top seemed to justify their grading, but it was the lightly wooded and gentler lower slopes that had us grinning ear to ear. Although skiing among the trees is formally forbidden, as elsewhere in Austria, the wide glades between the trees here are used for summer pasture, so there is no question of damaging infant trees. Our guide couldn't be seen breaking the rules, but he was firmly of the view that we should, because the powder would be excellent. How right he was.

After 24 hours of continuous snow, it was not surprising that there was danger of avalanche. We were disappointed that the hoped-for climax to the day - another 1,000m vertical run from Palinkopf down another lift- free valley, this time ending up at Samnaun - was shut as a result. Instead, we took a shorter away-from-the-lifts piste from the Swiss border, as a prelude to the final descent to the Samnaun valley.

The red piste was eerily deserted apart from our group of four. Visibility was very poor, making it difficult to enjoy the considerable depth of fresh snow on the ungroomed and little-skied run. Suddenly, the texture of the snow changed; it became lumpy and relatively heavy, leading one of our number to take an awkward but fortunately survivable fall. We had skied into an avalanche.

In the prevailing conditions, it was impossible to gauge the scale of the slide, but the view of our guide - a ski school director from a neighbouring village - was that the piste should have been closed, and that the debris should be immediately explored in case anyone was buried, At the nearest lift station he took pains to impress these views on the attendant. It was a sobering reminder that winter in the mountains, whatever its attractions, is never going to be risk-free.