There are not many places where one can easily combine a ski holiday with a visit to one of the great cities of the world. Paris, London, New York, Rome, Florence, San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, St. Petersburg, Hong Kong—they are all a bit too far removed from the ski fields. Even Vienna is too far away from Austria’s mountains to make for a convenient commute. While Hungary is one place where this possibility exists, few people would realistically travel to Hungary specifically for its snow-sports. The Czech Republic, on the other hand, with around 200 ski areas, is a different story.
The landscape of the northern part of the country, the home of the Krkonose or Giant Mountains, is full of ski resorts, although many of them are very small, with less than 200 vertical meters of skiing. One well-known ski area in the region is Pec Pod Snezkou, home of the Czech Republic’s highest mountain, Snezka (1602 m). Unfortunately, the historic side-winding double chair lift that rises to the peak of Snezka accesses no pistes, and skiing is officially prohibited. The actual ski area, a few kilometers away, offers a more limited vertical of 385 meters on the slopes of Javor (1215 m).
During my visit to the Czech Republic, I visited Spindleruv Mlyn, the nation’s largest ski resort, situated only 130 kilometers from Prague. Here, a combination of cheap prices and adequate slopes legitimately attracts homegrown riders as well as enthusiasts from other nearby countries.
Spindleruv Mlyn has 23 lifts and about 25 kilometers of pistes. Two separate ski areas are situated in the mountains around the village, at Medvedin and at Svaty Petr, with Svaty Petr being the larger of the two with 495 vertical meters of skiing and sixteen lifts. The skiing in Spindleruv Mlyn reaches to 1310 meters, barely topping the Hungarian ski areas. Nevertheless, there is usually adequate snow cover well into April.
The terrain is strictly for learning and intermediate cruising, and off-piste skiing is not much to think about in these lowlands where most of the pistes are trails with thick forests along both flanks. Nevertheless, the prices for lodging, skiing, food and drink are low, making Spindleruv Mlyn a decent alternative for families with young children as well as for skiers in the early stages...
The complete story is in the coffee table book Skiing Around the World by Jimmy Petterson.
