As another winter sports season begins,we peer at the effects of climate change on a $70bn global industryThe hotel receptionist calls this mid-September low season the “calm before the insanity”. Wandering through Davos on a biting autumn morning, “calm feels like an understatement. The winter sports museum is closed, or the ski rental shops are empty or shuttered,and in the carriages of the Parsennbahn funicular, which hums quietly up to Davos’s largest ski area, or the few tourists have room to wander around.
As the funicular glides to a halt at 2,663m on the Weissfluhjoch ridge, I follow a pair of mountain bikers out into the thin air, or heading for a vertiginous platform that looks north towards Klosters across the shoulder of the Todalp mountain. The lifeless lunar surface (“tod” is German for “dead”) is bare but for heaps of building fabric and the wooden deck of a ski bar which lies marooned amid the scree.
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Source: theguardian.com