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The ski area’s architects
Téléverbier celebrates 75 years of history
Let’s travel back through time. The roaring twenties were in full effect when the first skiers launched themselves down Verbier’s snowy slopes. Was it 1925, or was it even earlier? No matter… What really counts is the way in which it was done: a long trek uphill with climbing skins from Sembrancher, just above the mayens, followed by a single descent (which is never long enough) along the sun-drenched hillsides.
95% sweat, 5% downhill
The sport was still a well-kept secret when Marcel Michellod (aka “the Yeti of Les Ruinettes”) founded the VerbierSki School (ESS) with a few friends in 1933. To warm up in the mornings, he did a calisthenic routine before climbing the slopes in switchbacks to pack down the snow and “groom” the slopes… It was a lot of effort for a very short-lived reward.
After the war, a general sense of optimism returned, complimented by modern advances, and the idea to build a ski lift was born. It was a funiluge, which worked with a cable attached to a hand-started engine that would pull a large sled, carrying 12 passengers, up the slope. In 1947, the funiluge was replaced by a ski tow that had plat-shaped seats — a first!
The origins of Téléverbier
Was it a crazy idea or a way to secure the future? No one could say, but two days before Christmas, in 1950, the Médran “chairlift” opened and it was revolutionary: Switzerland’s first detachable monocable device — which soon spread throughout the country. It was a strange machine, with its openwork metallic booth, but it was a first step, soon followed by others: a drag lift at Tête des Ruinettes (1952), a single-seater lift (1955) and a drag lift (1956) in Savoleyres, Red, Blue and Green drag lifts financed by the Verbier Ski School in 1957, and, the same year, the inauguration of the Attelas cable car. In the years that followed, the Vaux basin and the Médran valley were also equipped with lifts.
Summit euphoria
Skiing exploded in popularity in the 1960s-1970s, encouraging new investments in the area. Ski lifts began to run down from Le Châble and up towards Tortin and Mont Gelé (3,030 m). Then in 1967, the “Verbier Skilift Public Limited Company” officially became Téléverbier and bought back the Verbier Ski School’s lifts. Thus began a new era of increasingly ambitious projects, and, in 1983, the cable car reached Mont Fort, solidifying the ski area’s initial architecture.
Today, there are some 82 drag lifts, chairlifts, gondolas and cable cars that interlink the 4 Vallées’ six ski resorts over 410 km of slopes — the second largest ski area in Switzerland and one of the biggest in Europe. Far from resting on their laurels, Téléverbier continues to maintain, change, innovate and imagine. Médran IV in 2021. A new chairlift for La Pasay (Bruson) in 2022. A panoramic viewing platform on Mont Fort. And the upcoming télémixteproject that will link Esserts — Planards — Savoleyres, allowing passengers to travel from Verbier to Savoleyres-La Tzoumaz with their skis strapped on.
