Spend a Night at the Haunted Ski Chalet

It's fun, I swear

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At some point earlier this year—a year that feels like it has both been a dozen years and a few weeks long at the same time—I started thinking about this silly idea that I started calling Haunted Ski Chalet. It’s not necessarily an actual ski chalet with ghosts, but more of a state of mind.

I can’t say I’ve ever been to an actual ski chalet with the spirits of dead skiers floating around, but one year Emily and I did rent a ski cabin right before the start of the season in Manchester, VT., and there was a creepy stillness to the whole thing that I really liked. Add in an unexpected autumn snowfall, and the little lonely village felt sort of The Day After Tomorrow. Silent save for a few locals getting things ready here and there, the whole area was mostly desolate. Having grown up around of golf courses and tennis courts, I’ve always been fascinated and repulsed by areas meant to be filled with bourgeois fun when they’re totally empty. But a ski resort in early November with a little bit of accumulation on the ground was really inspiring. For years I’d been trying to keep the spirit of October, the spookiest month of the year, alive beyond Halloween. Walking through that town, I found my muse.

Haunted Ski Chalet is sort of an anti-hygge way of life. It’s cozy like the Norwegian and Dutch practice of getting comfortable in the colder months, it’s just with a little added note of debauchery. Exactly how much you want to throw in is entirely your business, but it’s drinking a little more than you maybe should or eating stuff out Meredith Erickson’s Alpine Cooking: Recipes and Stories from Europe's Grand Mountaintops or maybe Darra Goldstein’s Beyond the North Wind if you want to add a little Sad Russian Boy Season into the mix. Drink a lot of Champagne and Martinis, buy a fondue pot, but most importantly—especially with Omicron coming to mess up your wintertime plans—do as much as you can outdoors.

I can understand that saying something like that and posting a Slim Aarons photo of models enjoying cocktails at The Palace Hotel in Gstaad in 1984 maybe defeats the purpose of a Haunted Ski Chalet, but, again, you aren’t inside an actual ski chalet filled with ghosts; it’s more about just embracing winter. It’s part the chapter about the season and romanticism from Adam Gopnik’s Winter: Five Windows on the Season, a touch of Henry James ghost story where you’re wondering if there are any actual ghosts, a dash of Rowing Blazers x Babar whimsey, a whole lot of knitwear, maybe a hot tub if you’re cool with going in one in the winter (and why wouldn’t you be???) and definitely anything from the Jil Sander and Arc'teryx collab. It is embracing the cold and meeting it head on, fearing nothing (except, of course, Covid) and also finally getting rid of any silly lingering “No white after Labor Day” ideas. There is no way this won’t sound funny, but I think we as a society need to embrace winter whites more.

Ultimately, the goal is to take a page from the living and not the undead. When you go to a place like Montreal or the Twin Cities during those places infamously awful winters, you see people out and trying to squeeze some enjoyment out of intolerable conditions. You go to a ski resort and you see people having fun in the cold. This is really the prime objective: enjoy the time as best you can. Sure, it’s freezing and the sun goes down while you’re digesting lunch. Yeah, it’s likely if there is any snow near you, it’s probably a mess of trash and grey sludge ice within a few hours of falling. But you can work with it. You can get a heat lamp or maybe build a little fire pit, get a few friends who you can sit around with, drinking a bottle of Veuve Clicquot for no real reason besides, hey, you’ve got nothing better to do.