Lausanne - for serious skiing

By Christina Tree, Globe Correspondent, 12/2/2001

AUSANNE, Switzerland - As Olympic fever rises in Salt Lake City, the world's official Olympic capital welcomes winter with its usual quiet aplomb.

Lausanne has been home since 1915 to the International Olympic Committee and since 1993 to the sophisticated Olympic Museum, a showcase for the history and spirit of the Olympic movement. Displays range from athletes wrestling and running across ancient amphoras to blowups and interactive takes on recent games.

The location is fitting, for this university town takes its sports seriously, and in the winter that means skiing. The snowcapped foothills of the Rhone Alps rise dramatically from the opposite (French) shore of Lake Geneva, the view from every corner of town. World-famous Chamonix, Verbier, and Gstad lie within an easy drive, and nearer still - less than an hour by car or train, and 10 minutes by helicopter - are the Vaudoise Alps. These Swiss resorts, while well-known, are low-key: Villars and Gryon, Leysen and Les Diablerets.

Americans, I am told, account for only 1 percent of winter visitors in Villars, a compact, family-oriented resort I visited for several days last winter.

Here, two grand old hotels (The Parc is still grand, the other is now a Club Med) evoke genteel 1890s summers, but most lodging is in snug, moderately priced, wooden chalet-style inns, condos, and apartments, all stepped into the mountainside, overlooking the snow-capped Dents du Midi across the wide Rhone Valley.

It's a short trudge in ski boots to the maroon cars of the Edwardian cog railroad that toils from the middle of the village up to the base station of Bretaye. This is a beautiful spot: at 5,700 feet, encircled by peaks rising on every side to heights of more than 7,000 feet, middling as Alpine heights go, but magnificent to see and almost entirely accessible.

Ski lifts, ranging from T-bars and Pomas to a six-person chairlift, fan out in every direction, serving 120 kilometers of mostly intermediate trails. Expert skiers can explore the area's steeply wooded ''cols'' and shoots, and for intermediate skiers the marked slopes are sheer bliss.

Do such ski areas exist at similar altitudes in the American West? If so, I have never heard of them: endless open but gentle slopes with constantly unfolding views, each more magnificent than the last.

New England offers no midmountain break like Leo Crameri's Refuge de Frience. This ''refuge'' is a venerable chalet with a terrace overhanging the valley and a dark, low-beamed interior. Patrons gather around wooden tables and fill tiny glasses with local light but piquant Vuad wines dispensed from ingenious glass beakers, the perfect accompaniment to local specialties such as raclette (a cheese mixture into which you dip roasted potatoes), roosti (distinctive Swiss potato pancakes), and local wild mushrooms in cream.

Nor does any US ski resort of my acquaintance have a spa to rival Lavey-les-Bains. A 15-minute ride down into the valley from Villars, this elegant 1890s grand hotel in Lavey was built to take advantage of Switzerland's hottest natural mineral water springs. A recent addition, the sleek $9.6 million spa center, features every conceivable amenity. Patrons begin with an Olympic-sized indoor pool and proceed to an outdoor series of watery nirvanas: shoulder-drubbing fountains, whirling hot springs, and shallows where you can sun while warm water jets gently massage your body.

Between dips you steep in steam in the dark ''Hammas,'' its ceiling pricked with lighted stars, and in ''Le Pavillion Nordique,'' a sauna and plunge pool combo. The ultimate in relaxation is, however, a room accessed through layers of thick black drapes to ensure its soothing ultraviolet-lighted gloom, furnished with chaise and filled with new age music featuring, of all things, loon calls. All this for roughly $15 admission (towels included). The hotel, too, is moderately priced, with pleasant guest rooms, a good restaurant, and mountain views.

You can even ski from La Bretaye via intermediate slopes to a chairlift that transports you horizontally across some dramatic scenery to a fast new cable car that whisks you to above 9,000 feet and the summit of Les Diablerets glacier. Open for skiing all summer, Diablarates also draws year-round visitors to its futuristic new restaurant designed by Mario Botta, architect of San Francisco's striking Museum of Modern Art.

Wind unfortunately precluded this expedition during my stay, but I did reach the futuristic glass-walled summit building of Le Berneuyse (almost 7,000 feet) with its revolving Kuklos Restaurant and panoramic view of mountains and valley. The building is accessible by gondola from Leysin, an ancient village turned 19th-century tubercular cure center, turned ski resort and snowboarding mecca. The older and more elegant lodging places here tend to have been sanitariums and clinics. Villars and Leysin together account, incidentally, for far more than their share of the world's elite international schools, probably another reason for the superb public sports centers with large pools in both towns.

It was snowing lightly on our final evening in Villars as we boarded the cog rail for dinner at Restaurant du Col de Bretaye, a 19th-century chalet that's a base lodge-style eatery by day but a snug nighttime retreat after the lifts stop. It specializes in fondues and local wines, of which we consumed enough to work up courage for the torchlight procession down a gentle run (very like Stowe's Toll Road) paralleling the cog.

Our downhill course continued the next morning. Zig-zagging down no more than 10 miles but thousands of feet in altitude, we were surrounded by Rhone Valley vineyards. More than any other part of Switzerland, this canton of Vaud is an area of family-operated vineyards, and in Chexbres we stopped at the cafe and cave operated by Leo Bovy, whose family has been making wine for 300 years on the shores of Lac Leman. Leo proffers visitors glasses of his signature St. Staphorin, drawn from a row of giant barrels, each decorated by his grandfather.

The weather in Lausanne was borderline balmy and the city far more interesting than I remembered from a long-ago student summer when I was less interested in museums (18), galleries (50), restaurants (500), shops (1,500), theater, opera, and ballet.

Lausanne is a walkable city. While it's built improbably on three hills, bridges span the intervening rivers and valleys, and a metro glides up and down the steep incline between the midtown Place St. Francoise and Ouchy, the resort-like lakefront.

When the International Olympic Committee proposed building a museum in the lakeside Parc de Nantou, it caused quite a fuss, but despite its white marble facade (a gift from Greece), the building blends in nicely, resembling one of the many sculptures in the park.

''The Olympic Spirit will find the pledge of freedom that it needs to progress in the independent and proud atmosphere that one breathes in Lausanne,'' proclaimed Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games.

As further evidence of its independent spirit, Lausanne is also home to the Musee de l'Art Brut (''Brut'' means raw or crude), a collection of art culled from prisons, mental institutions, and elsewhere beyond the usual pale. It was artist Jean DeBuffet's idea to search out ''works free from cultural conventions,'' and the results are stunning, standing squarely on their own merit and profoundly moving when you read the captions describing the artists and the circumstances in which they created them.

Lausanne's many museums include two very different gems that stand side by side on the city's oldest and highest of its major squares, the Place de la Cathedrale. The 13th-century Gothic Cathedral of Notre Dame is a beauty with a huge rose window composed of more than 100 stained glass panes, more than 70 of them dating to 1200.

The nave is a venue for concerts, and benches, set under trees in the cobbled square out front, command a magnificent view of the city spread below to Lac Leman and the mountains beyond.

Christina Tree is a freelance writer from Cambridge.

This story ran on page T13 of the Boston Globe on 12/2/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.