Turkish Delight

Hidden among more familiar sights are a clutch of ski resorts, dusted with powder and fragant with sweet promise.

- Jimmy Petterson

MANY OF THE BEST SKI RESORTS IN THE world have grown so large that they have lost their authenticity and charm. Lifts lead in every direction, even crisscrossing like flyovers at a junction. All that infrastructure attracts mass tourism, and the resorts offer maps, guidebooks and even apps to shepherd the crowds through the lift system and array of pistes.

But where is the adventure in all this? Where is the joy of self-discovery? With that in mind, I left the Alps in February 2017, in the middle of a winter with plenty of snow, and pointed my skis south. With an old friend Axel Persson, and Swedish journalist Daniel Breece, an avid snowboarder, we headed for western Turkey. There we aimed to cram as much skiing as we could into a road trip connecting some of its more familiar tourist venues.

Our first stop was Bozdag, a resort in the western part of the country, about 90 minutes by car from Izmir. As with many developing countries, there is a huge difference between the way of life in Turkey’s cities and in its rural areas. Imagine what an Austrian mountain village might have looked like 100 years ago, before the advent of tourism – primitive houses made of stone and wood, dirt and cobblestone roads, barnyard animals wandering around freely. Welcome to Bozdag.

Infrastructure? Not much. We billeted ourselves in the only hotel in town – the Bozdag Doner Hotel – though there was also a hotel 10km away at the base of the mountain’s two lifts. Being so close to Turkey’s third-largest city means that many who visit the pistes are day-trippers only.