A tour across the Alps – on skis and in gondolas

Train is cancelled. When Guido Flick read this sentence on the display board at his transfer station in Stuttgart, he got in a bad mood for the first time on his trip. His tour hadn't really started yet, because it was precisely this train that was supposed to take him to the starting point of his experiment: crossing the Alps of a different kind. While other Hamburgers spent a lot of time in traffic jams and looking for parking spaces during the March ski holidays congested valley stations, Flick wanted to prove how easy it is to travel from ski area to ski area on skis, gondolas and lifts - and if possible only short train or bus routes - until you have crossed the Alps: from west to east, from Nice to Bad Gastein. First, however, it was supposed to go to the Côte d'Azur by train and then return on your own tour.

So it didn't start well, but now with a cup of beer in the Gastein Valley, a good 800 kilometers northeast of where he started, he can laugh heartily about the unsuccessful beginning of his plan. Now he finally has everything behind him, accomplished everything he set out to do. Instead of going via Genoa and Monaco, he went to Nice via Marseille. And got there just 20 minutes later than originally planned. “That was the reconciliation,” he says.

Guido Flick is 55 years old, a lawyer with a law firm on the Colonnaden in downtown Hamburg and has been a passionate skier for more than 50 years. More than 40 years later he travels to the Gasteinertal in the Salzburger Land, because there, very close to the Belle Époque spa town of Bad Gastein, his parents bought a holiday home in the early 1980s. From Munich there is a direct train to Bad Gastein, from Hamburg one to Munich – the Flick family preferred to go skiing by train from an early age. “It was much more relaxing with small children than the long car journey,” says Flick. So when the question "A 7 or east route?" was discussed in the circle of friends before the ski holidays, Flick answered: "ICE."

If he sometimes stayed longer in the valley than the rest of the family, he looked at the map of the area. And quickly discovered that he could cover a certain distance at least as quickly by taking a cable car and skis over a mountain instead of driving around the respective mountains in a car. And for the routes in the valley he used ski buses, public buses and trains. Ten years ago he started his first attempts, he managed to cover a distance of up to 60 kilometers in just one day. And it became increasingly clear to him that constantly building larger parking lots at the valley stations of the ski areas is not a solution. "It's up to us skiers to make a change," he says.

And then Corona came. To be more precise, his own infection at Easter 2021. “In delirium and at home alone for five days, I looked at the map of the Alps. Where are which ski areas. Where there are railway lines. And then I made my plan.” Not because he wants to proselytize. "I'm not an eco freak and I don't want to convert anyone," says Guido Flick. “But I want to show that it is possible. Far too many people have absolutely no idea how easy it is to travel to ski resorts using public transport.” He knows the statistics: almost 80 percent of the CO2 emissions associated with a skiing holiday are caused by the outward and return journey return trip. Here is a simple lever that every tourist can use to achieve a better climate balance themselves. The man from Hamburg even found sponsors for his project in advance, so he didn't have to pay anything for the ski passes for the mountain railway companies, for example. He was also given an Interrail ticket for seven days after he had informed the relevant departments in the company about his plans - after all, the traffic problem in the mountains has long since become one of the major issues when it comes to the future of skiing.

Flick is concerned with the basic behavior and not with recommending his own tour of the Alps for imitation – as he admits, it often had nothing to do with skiing for pleasure. "Even the planning was really very complex," he says. For more than a year, he sat for two or three hours every weekend over maps of mountains, valleys and ski areas, researched the last departure of the ski bus, studied train timetables, estimated the possible distance per day and looked for appropriate accommodation. For his route, he only chose groomed pistes. Ski tours were not an option for him - too dependent on the weather and therefore not easy to plan. He never missed a ski bus. "It was rather a pity when, out of sheer caution, I skied down the mountain too early and was then down fifteen minutes too early." In the 15 minutes he would of course have preferred to do one more downhill run, maybe even an enjoyable one.

"The nice thing about traveling without a car is the freedom," says Flick. "I never have to go back to the parking lot." And you don't really need a lot of luggage if you go to breakfast and dinner in ski pants. A pair of light sneakers for the walking distances was probably the heaviest part of the ten-kilo backpack, and he took a couple of very important things with him twice, just to be on the safe side: ski goggles and gloves. Otherwise, detergent in a tube was just as faithful a companion as a mobile ski boot heater, "because nothing is more uncomfortable than wet shoes".

The man from Hamburg spent a total of 19 days skiing to get from Nice to Bad Gastein. One day he might want to calculate how many kilometers he has covered by train and bus, how many meters of altitude he has covered by gondola and skis. Although: That's not really important to him. It is more important to him that he can give the tourism associations his feedback. For example, that buses and regional trains at national borders are sometimes a disaster.

The only way back home is by car. After all, his wife Ines Flick and his dog Fiete were waiting for him on the platform in Gastein at 8:16 p.m. on Sunday, March 12th. And with a shepherd mix, a 1,000-kilometer train journey isn't quite the truth after all.

The Alpine crosser reports on his tour on his blog at www.alp-x.com and on Instagram at @alp_crossing.