New Book ‘Around The World In 50 Slopes’ Now Available
Veteran snow travel writer Patrick Thorne’s new book Around The World in 50 Slopes, takes skiers on a journey between ski runs located in 30 countries across six continents and is now available to buy in book stores and online.
Patrick, whose last book Powder, The World’s 50 Greatest Ski Runs, topped Amazon’s ski-books best-seller list for over six years, has taken a different approach in choosing his 50 runs for his new book.
“There are lots of lists online covering the world’s steepest, most challenging runs and it’s normally the usual suspects, but I’m more interested in runs that have a story to them, an added dimension beyond just being great runs. In short, I wanted to compile all the amazing stories I’ve been collecting over the past four decades,” says Patrick.
Patrick, nicknamed ‘The Snow Hunter’, is believed to be one of the few people in the world to have made a living over nearly four decades as a year-round ski holiday travel writer and researcher. Over the years he has written tens of thousands of ski news stories and articles for hundreds of publications around the world. The long-time editor of InTheSnow magazine, he is the author of more than a dozen ski books. The first, The Essential Ski Holiday Guide was published by Collins in 1985 when Patrick was just 21 years old. In the 1990s, in the pre-internet era, he sought to locate every ski area on earth, eventually finding more than 6,000 in 80 countries. In the 2010s he went beyond mere earth-bound snow and researched snow on other moons and planets for the book ‘Snow In Space.’
The runs take us to the world’s most northerly and southerly ski areas, to slopes skiable 365 days a year, or on the only slope for thousands of miles in southern Africa, down a volcano in the Andes or under the phenomenal northern lights.
There are slopes connected to James Bond, Franz Klammer, St Patrick, The Beatles, Santa Claus, Jesus Christ, Emperor Hadrian, Kim Jong-un, Count Dracula and even the Greek God Zeus. One run follows the line below the flight of a witch and another a route once popular with smugglers.
Although having famous runs is not a priority, the book does contain the steepest and longest runs, along with several legendary World Cup and Olympic downhill courses.
Some of the runs are important in the history of snow sports, marking key points in the evolution of many of the world’s great ski areas, including Mammoth Mountain, St Moritz and the Colorado run where (arguably) the first snowboarding competition took place.
Some of the more serious subjects raised include the development of ski areas to reverse rural depopulation, the battle by indigenous tribes to keep control of their ancestral lands (Several opting to run their own ski areas), the connections between different religions and ski resorts, how former mining communities reinvented themselves thanks to ‘white gold’, the fight for gay rights, a ski area recovered from the Taliban, how some ski areas developed thanks to the growth of rail networks and even ski areas that developed thanks to mountain warfare training.
The climate emergency is another subject that Patrick, who also runs SaveOurSnow.com, and other skiers have witnessed first-hand. One famous run graphically illustrates the impact of melting glaciers.
But then many of the runs are just simple fun with themes like cheese, love and Christmas.
“The late great ski filmmaker Warren Miller got it spot on when he said his favourite ski run was his next ski run. It doesn’t matter if it’s the longest or the steepest, if you’re a great skier or a novice, so long as you are loving your life in the snow,” Patrick concludes.
Each of the 50 slopes includes a fact box and a hand-drawn map with the run’s location marked on.
Around The World in 50 Slopes is a 246-page hardback book published by Wildfire Books priced at £16.99 and available now in bookshops and online. The Kindle edition is £8.99.
https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/patrick-thorne-2/around-the-world-in-50-slopes/9781472294357/
