A peek into Poland’s ski culture.
words :: Andrew Findlay // photography :: Kari Medig
“I don’t enjoy skiing,” says my ski guide, Jacek Zięba-Jasiński, as we rally his battered Subaru into a muddy lot.
Looking up at the ski hill, I immediately understand. On a T-shirt-warm February afternoon, skiers and snowboarders jockey for space down a brown-tinged ribbon of artificial slush snaking through farm fields. ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” pumps loudly from lift-tower speakers while vacationers, many in faux-fur collared jackets, crowd around slopeside restaurant tables sloshing with pints of pilsner.
Coming from a country like Canada, where people tiptoe around topics in fear of causing offense, Polish bluntness is refreshing. Earlier in the day Jacek mentioned that Poland is the grumpiest of all Slavic nations. He sounded proud. I asked why. He mused that the crusty temperament was either a reflection of perpetual grey and rainy skies, or the country’s tortured history. It’s probably both.
In the spirit of bluntness, nothing I had seen on the slopes of Poland so far would inspire anything but an impulse getaway to a Mediterranean beach resort. Yet somehow, despite having just a fringe of mountains along its southern borders with Slovakia and the Czechia, and with dozens of its resorts relying heavily on artificial snow, Poland has fostered a bad-ass mountain and ski culture.
Intrigued, I’ve journeyed to Zakopane, Poland’s self-described winter sports capital. The region sprawls between low-elevation rolling hills and the rugged peaks of the country’s beloved Tatra National Park. My first stop is Polana Szymoszkowa, a one-piste wonder on the south-facing flank of Gubałówki Hill.
My ski guide didn’t bring his skis, but we ride the lift together—in silence. At the top, he exits right to join a throng of tourists strolling a narrow road lined with kiosks at the top of Gubałówki Hill (1,129 metres /3,704 feet). The smoky smell of grilled meat fills the air. A young woman in a colourful dress sells oscypek, a regional speciality of smoked sheep cheese, while next door a grizzled old-timer in a black leather jacket peddles stuffed animals, plastic toy machine guns and huge, menacing knives with curved blades.
I click into my bindings and head left into a current of people shredding the only open run, 200 vertical metres of slushy corn. Keeping my head on a swivel, hockey-style‚ I weave a path through the chaos.
People seek mountains for many reasons: to slide down them, to embrace physical and mental challenges, to ascend closer to God and to simply escape. Travel back in time through Polish history, and it’s easy to understand why mountains represent a place of refuge and solace. After only two days in the country, I’ve noticed how quickly ordinary Poles like Jacek dive into eye-glazing historical explanations, as though the act of unpacking their history for visiting foreigners facilitates better understanding it themselves.
A point of national pride, it seems, is the glorious Kingdom of Poland, which survived intermittently for 800 years until the end of 18th century. It’s been a bumpy ride ever since. For a century, Poland was more or less a vassal of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the empire crumbled in the First World War. Polish independence was brief. The country’s swift defeat by the Germans in 1939 was a national humiliation that marked the start of the horrific Nazi occupation.
Six years later when the Nazis retreated, they scorched the earth and tried in vain to eradicate the atrocities of Auschwitz and dozens of other concentration camps that scarred the landscape and psyche of Poland. The country’s reward for enduring Nazi occupation was a 45-year sentence to authoritarian communist rule behind the Iron Curtain. Neighbour snitched on neighbour. The watchers watched. Freedoms came under attack. Tension underscored day-to-day life that could be as bland as northern Europe’s drizzly winter skies.
How enticing the light and freedom of the mountains must have been during those stultifying decades, when mountaineering literally became an escape from oppressive communism.
How enticing the light and freedom of the mountains must have been during those stultifying decades, when mountaineering literally became an escape from oppressive communism. Jerzy Kukuczka, Krzysztof Wielicki and Voytek Kurtyka were among a vanguard of Polish climbers, many so poor that they made their own gear, for whom the mountains became a ticket to freedom. The 1980s was a golden era in Polish mountaineering. As though climbing Himalayan giants was too easy in the relatively warm and stable spring season, Poles made the first winter ascents of Everest, Annapurna and other 8,000-plus metre peaks in the sort of brutally extreme conditions that only next-level tolerance for hardship and deprivation can endure.
That Polish mountain stoicism also translated onto the ski slopes. The country has produced some notable skiers. The late Karol Jozef Wojtyła (Pope John Paul II) was a deeply conservative Catholic known to shred on skis. Fans of this sporty Polish pontiff called him “The Daredevil of the Tatras.” Even after his ascent to the papacy in 1978, he would escape Vatican City incognito with bodyguards to indulge his Polish skiing passion in the Italian Dolomites.
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Over the last decade, 37-year-old Polish phenom Andrzej Bargiel has become a world-leading ski mountaineer known for superhuman solo ski adventures. Last year he ticked off the first ascent and ski descent of Everest without the use of supplemental oxygen. Bargiel took two days to ski it, including 16 hours in the death zone above 8,000 metres and an unplanned overnight at altitude due to poor viz. This feat followed on his 2018 solo ascent and ski descent of the treacherously icy, steep and exposed K2.
Polana Szymoszkowa is no K2, but it comes with its own challenges. After my third trip up the highspeed quad, I look across the valley at rugged Tatra National Park, a 211 square-km patch of protected peaks that beckons with real snow. Standing at 2,499 m (8,199 ft), the park’s highest mountain, Rysy, is also the highest in the country.
Polana Szymoszkowa is no K2, but it comes with its own challenges.
Little time passes in the mountains of Poland before the talk turns to food. Surviving my first day on a Polish ski hill calls for celebration, and that evening I meet Jacek on the Krupowki, Zakopane’s bustling pedestrian thoroughfare. Vendors hawk LED-lit propeller toys that drop like multicolour shooting stars from the night sky. Families stand in line at the Parrot Zoo, oddly out of place on this winter day. Techno blasts from an open door. Someone slips a flyer into my hand advertising lap dances.
Jacek and I elbow through this mountain-town carnival to a corner table at Karczma Sabała, located in the same finely crafted building as the Hotel-Pension Staszeczkówka. Built in the late 19th century, the hotel welcomed artists, intellectuals and mountain enthusiasts escaping to Zakopane for the fresh air,
hot springs and relative freedom.
Little time passes in the mountains of Poland before the talk turns to food.
The period was the start of big changes as the community transitioned from remote sheepherding village to bursting tourism destination. Inside the restaurant, diners shout to be heard over the folk band with two violinists, an upright bass player and a virtuoso accordionist. Music and dance have a strong tradition among Gorals, as the Slavic people of the Tatras are known. The Polish word Goral means simply “highlander.”
“Being Goral has become a profession in Zakopane,” Jaceks tells me, his lips curling into a cynical grin. These people know how to party, and the vibe is infectious to visitors to the region.
Over a mountainous meal of jagnięcina and placki ziemniaczane (lamb skewers and potato pancakes), I learn more about Jacek’s life. His curriculum vitae, it turns out, is as unconventional and convoluted as Polish history. Born and raised in Zakopane, he studied theatre at university in Krakow and performed on stage, continuing his thespian career even after returning to his hometown. He also moonlighted as a voice actor—his natural baritone landing him a gig doing a Darth Vader voice-over for a Polish version of a Star Wars-themed video game. Then the mountains called, and he became certified as a Tatra Mountain hiking guide while chipping away at a novel about time travel.
I sip a digestif of schnapps while Jacek hatches tomorrow’s plan—to visit Poland’s highest ski resort. Topping out at just under 2,000 metres, it’s the only one in the country that relies 100 per cent on real snow. But before heading to the gondola in the morning, Jacek insists we meet first at the local cemetery.
I wake early and arrive at the appointed time outside a tiny wooden Catholic church, a vestige of a century ago. We walk through a stone-arched entrance into the cemetery. I expect Gothic and gloomy, which would be a perfect pairing with Jacek’s deep-voiced and ponderous narration. But rather than sombre, the gravestones are creative and whimsical, with deeply personal tributes to the souls they commemorate.
“There’s a few well-known mountain climbers buried here,” Jacek says, pointing to shrines festooned with rusting pitons, hexentrics and other climbing implements.
An hour later, we stuff ourselves into a packed gondola for the journey to Kasprowy Wierch. Light clouds cling to the surrounding peaks. A bracing wind gusts from the north.
Lovestruck couples, young families with infants in backpacks and others who look as though they have never before set foot on snow all hike a slick and narrow ridgetop path to a high point straddling the Slovakia–Poland border.
Mountain guides scatter with groups along the rocky crest, teaching rope, ice axe and crampon skills. Jacek goes to visit an old friend who runs the Kasprowy Wierch weather station. I drop into a long ski run that’s blessedly empty. A dozen or so people carve firm, groomed snow to the bottom of a subalpine basin ringed by vertical walls and couloirs.
Winter has been stingy so far this season in northern Europe, but up on Kasprowy Wierch a skiff of fresh dusts the peaks. Two young ski racers bash gates on a course at the edge of the run. A coach or parent barks encouragement from the side. The vacant slopes call for speed. On my last run I venture off-piste. It’s a mistake. Hard, bumpy snow and barely concealed rocks send me scurrying back to the groomer. Sitting on the chairlift, I watch tourists crawling along the ridgetop path to the resort’s requisite selfie spot. Two teams of ski mountaineers ascend toward steep couloirs splitting the surrounding craggy summits.
When it comes to mountains, Poles are as unpretentious and unfussy as they are blunt. They love it all. Perilously crowded strips of artificial snow, raw and natural big mountain terrain in the Tatras, or freezing their arses on wintry Himalayan faces, they have a way of getting after it, fur collars and all. It makes sense. In a country that in many ways still recovers from decades of oppression, the freedom of the hills is much more than a cliché—it’s etched into the soul of a people.
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