Why Your Next Ski Vacation Should Be In Greece
Just up the way from Apollo’s oracle may be some of the loveliest trails in the world. Welcome to Greece in the off-season.
Photographs by Alec Lesser
The Artemis chairlift was not particularly swift and even a little rickety, but it managed to safely carry me high up the slopes of Mount Helmos, and no matter which way I looked, my eyes fell on something mythic. To the southeast the nymph Thetis had dipped her son Achilles up to his heel in the immortalizing waters of the river Styx. To the west was Erymanthos, where Hercules completed his fourth labor by subduing a giant wild boar. Northward I could make out Mount Parnassos with Delphi on its slope, home to the oracle of Apollo. But most striking of all, beyond the six-foot piles of marshmallow snow, was the sea, sparkling through the jagged, snowy peaks at the edge of the Peloponnese. It was only when my guide, Andreas Papagiannitsis, nudged me to dismount Artemis that I remembered that I had come to Greece to ski.
“Which trail?” I asked. “Antigone, Elektra, or Irene?”
“We’ll take Irene,” Andreas replied. “It means ‘peace.’”
Exactly right. I pushed off and headed down fresh snow, hardly another alpinist in sight. Up until now…
