Peak Performance: Zermatt

Zermatt, I have discovered, is where superheroes go on holiday. As I stood on the Matterhorn Glacier Express gondola, gliding over perilously sharp peaks and jutting crags, I examined my fellow salopetted crusaders. On display were helmet cams, goggles with speedometers embedded in the visor, a snowboard with a peaked tip like a surfboard: things had really moved on since the last time I was skiing in Switzerland in the 1980s, when the scant comfort of a rickety chairlift was a luxury. As the cable car was sucked into a hole in the side of the mountain at 4,000 metres (this I learned from my neighbour and his nifty altitude-reading goggles) and we piled out, I couldn’t help thinking I was going to bump into Brains and the crew from Thunderbird 5.

‘Wow, you feel like you’re on top of the world,’ said an American voice. I was thinking the same thing. The milky green Monte Rosa glacier, all broken and buckled from the earth’s shifting crust, glinted in the afternoon sun. I could make out Mont Blanc sitting proud in the distance and I started to understand the ‘trance sublime’ that came over Percy Shelley when he gazed upon this ‘secret throne’ in the early 1800s.

But this was no time for meditation: there was serious skiing to be done. The most famous mountain in Zermatt is the Matterhorn, easily recognisable by its triangular shape. As I bombed past its southern face I started thinking about chocolate, Toblerone, in fact, which features the peak on its packaging, and how the gargantuan mass of rock actually looks like it’s made of chocolate. At its foot lies the town of Zermatt, spilling over three valleys carved out in the Ice Age and worn down by three glacial streams that converge into the Vispa river, bisecting the town. There’s a church that dongs its bells every quarter of an hour and most of the houses are traditional wooden cabins made of timbers as weathered as the leathery faces of their owners. Cars are banned and there’s only one eyesore, a McDonald’s, but it does its best to blend in among the Moncler boutiques and watch galleries full of Swiss timepieces with six-figure price tags.

The entrance to our hotel, The Omnia, ten minutes’ walk up from the train station, looked like the Bat Cave. The dimly lit tunnel, bored out of granite, takes you to a boot room with a chip-activated glass door where heated lockers dry your soggy kit. A glass lift then propels you 20 metres up through a rocky outcrop to the sleek reception that is heavy on blond wood and modernist furniture. There’s an indoor/outdoor pool (best at 6pm after the rush hour) with an expansive view of the valley, and an extremely good restaurant with a sophisticated European menu including steak tartare, and scallop and truffle ravioli.

I was travelling with my other half, Javier, who prefers everything that goes with skiing holidays — the hearty breakfasts, the people-watching, the après-ski — to the actual sport, which meant I invariably spent half the day skiing alone while he took an early Jacuzzi and made dinner plans. ‘We would like an authentic restaurant where only the Swiss go,’ he informed the concierge, who sent us to Stockhorn, a nearby establishment named after the mountain I’d been up earlier that afternoon, lured by its very high and very long yellow run. (Warning: yellow runs are not somewhere between green and blue; they are unbashed black runs and invariably come with thigh-destroying moguls.) Inside, there were wooden tables with gingham cloths and ladies in dirndls serving lager by the litre while taking care not to tread on the big dogs sitting at their owners’ feet.

We fuelled up on raclette with potatoes, a particularly vinous fondue, followed by some vitello tonnato (veal in tuna sauce; there is a strong Italian influence here as the resort of Cervinia sits just over the border on the other side of the Matterhorn). We enjoyed it so much that Javier gave the concierge the same brief the following day and off we went to Casa Rustica, a restaurant in the style of an old mountain lodge with stuffed stag, ibex and eagle heads on the walls. Here we shared an enormous rösti, heavy on onions and lardons with a fried egg on top and so filling that we could barely find room for any of the meat fondue with its bubbling bouillon.

This kind of ballast is essential when you’re trying to negotiate icy black runs. The next day I decided to have another crack at that yellow. I shared a chairlift with three students, who halfway up sparked up something that smelt suspiciously illegal. Ha, I thought, they’ll never make it down now. What I hadn’t noticed were their stunt skis with telltale turned-up tips. As I fiddled with my goggles, off the boys flew, nonchalantly gliding over the moguls, trailing clouds of powder spray. Maybe this superhero lark is just not for me. After finally making it to the bottom (with the stoners nowhere to be seen) I returned to the luxuries of The Omnia. It was time to make plans for dinner.

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Double rooms at The Omnia from £230 (350CHF) per night (the-omnia.com)