Ski mountaineering in the Bavarian Alps, Germany

“Tourism destroys what it conjures by appropriating it.” Many reports on the overtourism of the Alps start with a quote freely adapted from the prolific writer and philosopher Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Theory of Tourism (1996 [1958]). Since this mountain range in the center of Europe is easily accessible by car and its foothills close to metropolitan areas, day trips and short stays are an ever-increasing business model for rural communities, as well as being a topic of contestation for nature conservation. What have changed, however, are the particular tourism strategies: the protection of flora and fauna, landscape, as well as local cultural traditions is now a matter of public responsibility to sustain its usage for everyone’s recreation.

Nevertheless, mountaineers have long been beset by an intrinsic contradiction: while they long to be in ‘nature’, they also invade—even conquer—it, with high-tech equipment, specialized clothes, and skilled techniques. Semantically alpinists understand the mountains as ‘wild’ and ‘remote’ and yet interweave ‘nature’, and its ideological counterpart ‘civilization’, with cars, chairlifts, restaurants, and hotels. Enzensberger poignantly captured this dilemma when he wrote: “The key role of alpine endeavor consists in the fact that it symbolizes the very concept of the romantic ideology of tourism. It strives for the ‘elemental,’ the ‘pristine,’ the ‘adventure.’ Whatever name one assigns this goal, the dialectic of the process remains the same: once it is achieved, it is destroyed.” (1996 [1958], 126)

To assess how tourists, both individually as well as collectively, reconcile their worship of a unique environment with its exploitation, this project will look into the growing trend of ski mountaineering in the Bavarian Alps, southern Germany. Many advocates of SKIMO promote it as less invasive alternative to large-scale commercial skiing resorts that increasingly rely on the production of artificial snow. Ski mountaineers especially appreciate the embodied dimension of their sport as being closer to, and indeed in, ‘nature’ when exerting the physical labor needed to climb up a mountain before skiing down. “Earn your turns” is their slogan. Given the fact that a high number of off-piste skiers are men and male professional guides outnumber female by 5:1, the case study also raises questions surrounding gender in the appropriation of difficult-to-access spaces of nature, and more generally, in the perception of landscapes.

SKIMO took on a yet different dynamic during the pandemic winter of 2020/21, when tourism was discouraged throughout most regions of the Alps and German ski resorts were not allowed to open at all. Many conventional alpine skiers or snowboarders switched to touring skis or split boards but did so on prepared slopes that are easier to access and master. This phenomenon raises questions about the comparison of commercial resorts with off-piste skiing: Exactly, how invasive are different winter sport infrastructures? What are their effects on plants and wild animals, especially when their usage intensifies? While some argue that the production of artificial snow consumes less energy than is depicted by environmentalists and even serves to protect vegetation from erosion, others report soil compaction, deforestation, and pollution through both garbage and noise. Nor is ski touring uncontroversial: High-altitude places thus far untouched by mass tourism face increasing intrusion and less experienced mountaineers may endanger others by triggering avalanches. In particular, many newcomers to the sport appear to be relatively uninformed or do not adhere to voluntary detours around forest protection areas for wild animals (Wald-Wild-Schutzgebiete) that were established to protect the habitat of the black grouse (Birkhühner) and other species of mountain dweller.

No matter how sensitive visitors are and regardless of whether local authorities strategies to either concentrate the tourist flow onto a few particular places or scatter it over a wider area, day trippers are all part of the same problem: The vast majority of them travel to and from the mountains by car and contribute to traffic jams, overcrowded parking lots and carbon emissions (80% of CO2 created by ski tourism is due to transportation to the ski area itself). As the Bavarian Alps are easily accessible from the Munich metropolitan area, many locals moan about heavy traffic on the weekends and anger against “M” license plates has intensified over the last years. Nevertheless, tourism is the major economic driver of the region.

To promote alternatives to mass tourism, the Austrian Alpine Clubs launched the label “mountaineering villages” (Bergsteigerdörfer) to relatively small and remote communities for their commitment to sustainable tourism, nature and landscape conservation, as well as the preservation of regional architecture and local traditions. When the German Alpine Club joined the initiative in 2015, the moniker was subsequently awarded to the villages of Kreuth, Schleching, Sachrang and Ramsau. Popular SKIMO routes also cut through the high pastures of these communities and offer a promising entry point for further investigations into the complex and disputed field of conservation and tourism. In speaking to various stakeholders involved, the focus of the research in this case study will be on the encounter between tourists and locals, their concerns and prejudices, as well as how mutual awareness and exchange could be enhanced to face the environmental challenges of the 21st century together.

Ethnographic methods of participant observation and in-depth interviews serve to dissolve supposed juxtapositions between actors in the mountaineering villages (e.g., locals also ‘use’ the mountains for skiing and many outsiders are active in conservation initiatives). Moreover, the visual method of GoPro-recording will be employed to afterwards watch and discuss the SKIMO experience together. The goal is to approximate embodied dimensions of the physical exercise in glacial altitudes and stimulate a co-reflective process to talk about individual as well as collective aspects of remoteness, tourism, and conservation.

Archival research of the annals of the Munich-based Alpine Club as well as Alpine Museum will add a historical layer to the study, enabling understanding how different modes of skiing as specific forms of environing a landscape have been discussed, promoted, implemented, and received over the past decades.