Most of us who head to the slopes each winter are impressed by the mountain scenery surrounding us. Sometimes – in the Canadian Rockies or Swiss Jungfrau, for example – it can be truly awe inspiring.
But sometimes, often when we least expect it, a ski resort produces something a little more unusual. Have you ever come across a smiling Jesus, a giant pink rabbit or a prehistoric shark high up on the pistes as you’re skiing along?
Yes, a wholly different type of manmade ‘sight’ appears every now and then on ski slopes around the world, and the view can sometimes be as amazing in its own way as those natural wonders.
Here are some of our favourites:
Picasso On The Pistes
One of the first resorts to embrace the idea of public art on the slopes was Flaine in the French Alps. Sometimes criticised for having a stark concrete 1960s resort development at its heart, Flaine is in fact an open-air art statement (even those concrete blocks are a statement of pure Bauhaus architecture). Various famous artist fans of Flaine have sent art to the resort, but the best-known piece, located at the base of the slopes, is a huge sculpture depicting the head of a woman created by Picasso.
The Crystal Cube
Guests of the 4★ Hotel Tirol in Serfaus-Fiss-Ladis are always wowed when they first see the remarkable Crystal Cube high up on the slopes, 2,600m up. It’s one of the most unusual locations in the world for a meal, cocktail reception or even a registry office wedding ceremony, and quite an intimate location too, with room for a maximum of eight diners.
To access the cube you take the gondola to the Schönjoch summit station and either walk or ride in an all-terrain vehicle to the Crystal Cube where floor-to-ceiling glazed walls offer breathtaking 360˚ views across the surrounding 3,000m high peaks from every vantage point.
Hotel Tirol guests can dine on a five-course menu of hot and cold Tirolean dishes; menus are personally tailored in discussion with the client. Prices are €71 per adult and €41 per child including drinks.
Rocky The Rock
Rocky, as he has been imaginatively christened, isn’t just any old rock; he, or it, is probably New Zealand’s best-known rock. Weighing in at 25 tonnes, he spent millennia on the slopes of the country’s famous Mt Hutt ski area before the 2011 eruption led to him rolling down the mountainside and crashing into the middle of a house below – fortunately not hurting anyone. The ski area bought Rocky back in 2013 after paying $50,000 in a charity auction. He made a triumphant ascension back up the mountain over several celebratory days.
The Giant Pink Rabbit
If you’re skiing in the little-known Italian region of Artesina, make sure you look out for a pink rabbit.
This isn’t any old pink rabbit, either; for one thing it has been knitted, for another it’s huge. Located on Mt Colletto Fava near the La Baita bar, it’s lying on its back and is 55m long, 41m wide and 2m high at its belly.
The rabbit is in fact an arts piece and it is slowly bio-degrading, having been knitted between 2000 and 2005 by an artists’ collective called Gelatin Arts who performed an artistic piece, “I love the rabbit, the rabbit loves me,” when he was declared complete in autumn 2005 and grabbed worldwide media attention. That bio degrading is supposed to be a 20-year process, so this winter marks the halfway stage.
Of course, if it’s a snowy winter, the rabbit will be largely buried and will just resemble snowy mounds anyway, so it may be hard to identify.
Lech’s Metal Man
Antony Gormley, the sculptor of the famous ‘Angel of the North’, is equally famous for placing small armies of life-size metal men in locations around the world. In 2010 one hundred of these statues were placed over a 58m2 area in the Austrian Alps, centred on the resort of Lech, some of them close to the resort’s lifts. Two years later, 99 of the statues moved on, but one got left behind.
St Moritz Submarine
A surfaced submarine in a land-locked, frozen lake is not the first thing you expect to see when you look out of your hotel window in the morning, but that was the case in St Moritz last March when a large sub appeared in Lake St Moritz.
The submarine was, in fact, an art installation-cum-pop-up bar, created by the Swiss inventor Andreas Reinhard, who made his name by creating the first upside-down hot-air balloon in 1994.
The Kulm submarine bar, which measured 40m in length, 9m high by 4m across, was constructed by a team of 13, including an engineer, architect, carpenter, locksmith, electrician, painter and lighting technician. Built over a two-week period in a warehouse near Zurich, in utmost secrecy, it was then transported in pieces to St Moritz and assembled overnight, so that its arrival was a complete surprise to local residents. Sadly the sub has now sailed, but like Nessy the monster in Loch Ness, it may be worth keeping an eye out in case it re-appears.
Jesus
Statues of Jesus are of course quite common in the Alps, but none quite resemble the Jesus that has been standing for 60 years on the slopes of Whitefish in Montana. A much more ‘human’ version of the Messiah than the wood or metal effigies, this ‘life-size’ statue of Jesus has been welcoming skiers and boarders to his little corner of the slopes since the 1950s, despite determined (but as yet unsuccessful) attempts by secular organisations to argue that ‘he’ should be removed.
The Dachstein Shark
In summer 2013, visitors to Lake Hallstätter See in Austria were surprised to see a Kamov helicopter lift a giant shark out of the watery depths and then carry it up to a point 2100m up where it was stood up on its tail, towering above the surrounding landscape.
The Dachstein shark is a replica of the mighty ice sharks that used to swim in the area when it lay on the bottom of the ocean. This particular specimen has a hollow interior and a ladder so you can enter by its, ahem, rear quarters, and climb up to look out of its open jaws – so it differs from the real thing in more ways than simply the fact it’s made of metal.
