Verbs, Darling

Skinny skis, wine skins, tan lines. Chairlifts were slow, the Farm Club floor was sticky, and a chalet holiday in Verbier was a simple, classy affair.

“Posh people always made their beds,” recalls Lindsay, one of the resort’s original chalet girls, with a wry smile.

In the Seventies and Eighties—well before this glamorous Swiss getaway became shorthand for heli-drops and billionaire bunkers—the mountains were largely the preserve of the rich and the British: toffs who treated their annual Verbier sojourn as a brisk interval between hunting, shooting, and fishing in Scotland. And their winter season was all about chalets. No locks on bedroom doors, no secrets between walls.

Catered by plummy-voiced, privately educated girls fresh from British boarding schools, they descended on the village by the Land Rover-load, rustling up spag bols and Victoria sponges by day, haunting the smoky, gloriously unruly bars by night—often with their guests. Among them were Sarah “Fergie” Ferguson, future Duchess of York, and just down the valley, Sophie, now Duchess of Edinburgh. They cooked, cleaned, skied, and partied—not always in that order.

It was a clubby sort of loucheness, Verbier’s signature cocktail.

But that wasn’t the only drink on the menu. Up on the mountain, something else was shaking, something that would transform skiing itself. It was freeskiing, and it was wild.

The story of Verbier began humbly enough: a handful of high-alpine mayens—simple wooden chalets—scattered across a high, southwest-sloping plateau facing the glittering Grand Combin. In 1925, the Swiss Alpine Club built the stone-walled Cabane Mont Fort as a resting post for climbers and for the first skiers willing to hike for their turns.

A road finally reached the village in 1949, and the first gondola followed in the 1950s. Strict architectural rules kept the village’s charm intact, and by the Sixties a second lift opened up virgin off-piste terrain. Verbier was on its way to becoming part of the vast Four Valleys, the largest in Switzerland—an area whose secret sauce was soon to be discovered.

For off-piste skiers, Verbier was destined to become a global mecca.

With a leap of faith—and many cliff jumps to come—in the Seventies, a young Canadian named Marko Shapiro arrived, intending to stay just one winter. By day, he washed dishes; by night, he DJ’d at the Farm Club. But his real talent lay behind the camera. Shapiro, later hailed as skiing’s “godfather of light,” would come to define an era and a resort he never left.

Shapiro soon fell in with skiers John Falkiner and Ace Kvale—one Aussie, the other American—a new tribe quietly redefining skiing. Together they formed Team Clambin, named for the little chalet they rented above the village for 300 francs a month. The Clambin Kids became the bohemian beating heart of Verbier’s emerging freeski culture, a hub for big-mountain skiers with a penchant for powder and face shots, long hair and big air.

Shapiro’s ground-breaking photographs captured not just the hippie-ski action but the wild beauty and limitless possibility of Verbier’s terrain. Runs like Stairway, Hidden Valley and Barry’s Bowl took shape under their long, thin skis. His images appeared in magazines, clothing ads, and travel PR around the world, projecting Verbier onto the global ski stage. Falkiner skied stunts for Willy Bogner and James Bond films, and Kvale graced countless magazine covers. Through Shapiro’s eye, the sport shed its aristocratic starch and became something cinematic. Verbier had become not just a resort, but a revolution in motion.

By the mid-Nineties, freeriding had taken on religious fervour. That faith found its pulpit in 1996, when the first Verbier Xtreme was held on the Bec des Rosses—an unforgiving 600-metre face of rock and snow that drops like a trapdoor onto 55-degree inclines. With no gates or markers, riders were judged on difficulty, line choice, control, fluidity, jumps and technique. Competitors climbed to the start, a deliberate rejection of manicured race pistes and synchronized slalom turns.

What began as an underground gathering evolved into the Freeride World Tour, the prestigious big-mountain competition that took its show from Alaska to Japan, from the Pyrenees to Patagonia. Freeride icons like Xavier de Le Rue, Candide Thovex, and Hedvig Wessel carved their names here, with fearless descents that echoed the same creative defiance that Shapiro and Falkiner embodied. Over nearly three decades, the event sculpted Verbier’s identity just as its slopes have shaped the athletes. Every spring, the world championship culminates right back where it began. Verbier.

These days, Verbier fully embraces its split personality. A redrafting of skiing’s cultural code—no longer a pastime for the privileged, but an art form of freedom—it attracts the gamut from the brutal Patrouille des Glaciers mountaineering racers, to ski bum mornings fuelled by Red Bull and matcha, to the Is it too early for champagne? crowd, here for the sun and the scene.

A beer at Fer à Cheval is never a bad idea, even for Richard Branson, who owns The Lodge, a timber-and-fur retreat above the Médran lift. Singer James Blunt is now a local fixture, with a ski lift and restaurant named after him. Prince Harry, Beatrice, and Eugenie are regulars at Farinet. Leonardo DiCaprio, Diana Ross, Jude Law, Barack Obama, the Beckhams, Hugh Grant – Verbier is sportier than oligarchic Courchevel, loucher than titled St. Moritz. The skiing is tougher, and hiring a guide always trumps taking a lesson.

The days when Prince Andrew’s credit was good are gone, of course, but the spirit of the chalet girls lives on – rejecting the walk of shame for the stride of pride, because that’s what Verbier has always offered. The freedom to dance till dawn in Ugg boots, the freedom to ski where no one’s skied before, where chalet girls and the gods of freeride share the same mountain air. 

Another winter in Verbs, darling?

Pourquoi pas.

Photography by Scott Markewitz