At the Gold Lot bus stop at Dulles airport, a woman spotted my skis and asked me where I was heading. “Slovakia,” I responded. She looked dumbfounded. “If you are a skier, you go where the snow is!” I told her. Snowfall in Slovakia, the mountainous eastern half of the former Czechoslovakia, just broke a fifty year record in February, attracting the attention of skiers from all over the globe. With no regrets, I departed the bare earth of the Mid-Atlantic, and headed to a land where between 100 and 300 centimeters of snow covered most major mountains.

At the Vienna airport, I nearly fell on the slick parking lot of the rental car area. Freezing rain had turned the roads into a mess, but ice gradually became snow shortly after Bratislava - a forty-minute drive from the airport. To be in a car headed to the mountains in a snowstorm is every skier’s dream but also his nightmare. The Volkswagen Golf I rented had snow chains but not snow tires, which forced me to pull over and put the chains on every time the road turned white. Fortunately, the snow was not heavy enough on my first day in Europe to compel me to struggle for 15 minutes to get these metal necklaces on my front tires, but I would employ them on many other occasions during the course of my 12-day visit to Slovakia and Austria.

Polona Mountain. Photo provided by John Sherwood.

Arriving at the farm of my wife’s parents on Polana Mountain in central Slovakia was like a scene out of Dr. Zhivago. Heavy snow on the steep access road forced me to offload my luggage onto a small sled and slide it 100 meters down a slope to the farm’s new guesthouse. Spruce paneling covered all the walls and ceilings of the two-room cottage, giving the place a distinctly alpine smell. Two new comforters recently stitched by my mother-in-law lay folded on the bed, and a wood stove pumped warmth into the kitchen. My mother-in-law soon came in with a plate of potato pancakes, fresh bread made by Capuchin monks at the monastery up the hill, fruit tee, and batter fried fish. Magpies swooped through the trees and a solitary European woodpecker pecked on a nearby tree. Over the next few days, I would often wander around the farm with a giant pair of Russian Army binoculars gazing at various birds, including a Eurasian Jay and a small flock of pheasants.

All the fresh snow on the ground, however, made me eager to take flight to a local ski center. My father-in-law suggested that I earn my turns by hiking and skiing the steep terrain around his farm. As a young man, Pope John Paul II (Karol Jozef Wojtyla) enjoyed earning his turns on the Polish side of the Tatras Mountains not far from where I stood. Being less virtuous than the former archbishop of Krakow and tired from travel, I opted instead for an easier solution: a local slope called Biele Vody (white water).

Continued snowy weather and the resort’s 1,100-meter (3,600 feet) altitude made chains a must. Biele Vody has a modest vertical of 200 meters (656 feet) and only two Poma lifts, but its steep terrain made for a dynamic afternoon of skiing. Furthermore, a half-day lift pass only cost 170 Slovak Crowns ($5.86). With over 100 cms of snow, I was in heaven. As Warren Miller would say, “The best ski resort in the world is the one you are at and the lifts are running.”

A Poma lift at Biele Vody. Photo provided by John Sherwood.

Well, sort of. Unfortunately, my “stairway to heaven” was not a chairlift but an old Slovak manufactured plate Poma that dragged skiers at a high rate of speed up a hill with grades of over 53 percent in spots. Before I could even attempt to ride this monster, someone fell and another skier pulled the cable off a spinning wheel as he tried to avoid the downed skier. I looked at my wife and sighed, “this is just like Timberline.”

But like Timberline, Biele Vody had an amazing capability to recover quickly from maintenance woes. In just ten minutes, the mountain operations people had the lift repaired. One of the advantages of Pomas over other forms of uphill transportation is their relatively easy maintenance and low operational costs. The disadvantage of these beasts is that on steep terrain, one must concentrate hard to remain on track. If the Poma stops, you slide backward until the lift’s arresting wire stops you. At the end of the day, the Slovak lifty told my wife that I had earned the “skier of the day award” for my sloppy Poma style. In stark contrast to my awkwardness were the local skiers I encountered. They not only road the Poma with ease, but skied this steep hill with elegance. I felt embarrassed on my new Volkl 6 Stars as 60-year-old skiers tore up the bumps on their long, straight skis. To ski is the life in Slovakia. Nearly everyone masters the sport at an early age, and over 101 ski resorts dot the landscape.

After about five runs, I needed to refuel so we headed to a mountain restaurant for some Slovak cuisine - a blend of German, Hungarian, and Polish cooking. The restaurant, a converted one-room schoolhouse, sold me a bowl of bean soup, a Diet Coke, and a plate of haluski (dumplings in a cheese sauce) for just 120 SKK ($4.13). One of the big advantages of skiing in Slovakia is its low cost relative to the Alps. At many mid-sized resorts, one can ski, sleep, and eat for less that $50 per person per day. Furthermore, most mid-sized resorts now have snowmaking and grooming machines. Even Biele Vody, a miniscule place by Slovak standards, grooms its terrain on most weekend days and has snowmaking.

A shot of Jasna. Photo provided by Roman Millan.

In addition to small and mid-sized resorts, Slovakia offers large destination-style resorts with world-class hotels. To get a taste of Slovakia’s upper end, I traveled to Jasna for two days with a Slovak photojournalist named Roman Millan, and stayed at a four star hotel called Tri Studnicky. A one night stay there with breakfast and dinner cost less than $100 per person.

Like me, Roman has a “real” job as an information management engineer with a Slovak bank and pursues ski journalism as an avocation. The two of us co-author the weekly ski report for the The Slovak Spectator, Slovakia’s English language weekly paper. Roman also runs a ski web site for Slovakia called Goski.sk, and produces much of the photography found on Slovak ski center web sites.

Jasna, the largest resort in Slovakia, offers a vertical drop of 922 meters (3,024 feet), and has some of the most modern lifts in the country, including a new high-speed detachable 6-pack with a bubble canopy. The resort is 260 kilometers east of Bratislava in the Low Tatras Mountains, but do not let the word “low” deceive you. Jasna offers more skiable terrain and vertical than any of the Slovak resorts in the High Tatras. Its slopes are also generally steeper and more challenging. Red Bull even selected Jasna to host one of its extreme skiing events this year.

After skiing in the Mid-Atlantic for the entire season, Jasna seemed huge. In some respects, the mountain, with its weaving tree-lined slopes, reminded me of Stowe. The major difference was the above tree line skiing on the top 15 percent of the mountain. High winds and snow made that terrain very difficult to handle, and prevented us from sampling the mountain’s famous back bowls. Roman and I once ended up off trail coming down from the Jasna top station and had to ski our way through a nasty rock field to get back on the piste. That experience dissuaded me from trying to hike up the steep, 400-meter (1,300 foot) vertical trail to the Chopok Juh back bowls. These bowls are serviced by Pomas on the south side of the resort, but there is currently no summit lift on the north side of Mount Chopok (2,024 meters / 6,640 feet). In the next few years, the resort plans to build a lift to finally link those southern bowls to the northern slopes of Jasna, but high winds will present challenges. On our last day at Jasna, all above tree line lifts on the north face closed at 1 p.m. due to high winds.

Another shot of Jasna. Photo provided by John Sherwood.

On a chairlift, we chatted with a Slovak skier from the nearby town of Liptovsky Mikulas. The skier, who worked as a lifty at Vail last year, could not believe that I had come all the way from America to ski Jasna. “I go where the snow is,” I told him. The skier told us that in three years, we would not recognize the place. Jasna has big plans to add more high-capacity lifts, and increase snowmaking capacity.

In the meantime, skiers must occasionally ride Pomas and put up with lines that can be longer than 20 minutes on weekends. Jasna’s greatest advantage and challenge is its proximity to Poland, a country of 46 million people that lies less than 100 kilometers north of the resort. Powder hungry Poles increasingly venture to Slovakia to ski rather than endure much longer lines at Poland’s only major ski center, Zakopane.

Soft bumps, double fall lines, and steep terrain left me exhausted after two day’s of skiing at Jasna, but happy to have experienced some of the best skiing in the Carpathian Mountains. When I returned to Hrinova, I found my wife in the barn with 9 baby lambs. While I was skiing, she had helped deliver and vaccinate these new members of the flock. In Slovakia, one not only can experience world-class skiing, but a rural way of life that has not changed much in the last 100 years.