Building a ski slope when you live in Denmark’s flatlands may seem like a pipe dream, but not for one intrepid cereal farmer.
Skiers are now swishing down Ole Harild’s 40m hill decked out with electric lights and a snow cannon, after he secured EU funding to turn part of his gently sloping land into a small ski resort.
Harild lives on the small island of Bornholm, which lies in the Baltic Sea between Germany and Sweden and dubbed “Sun Island” by summer holidaymakers. It’s just as flat as the rest of Denmark and there is only occasional snow, so it’s not the most obvious place to build a ski resort.
Photo: AFP
“I discovered that there’s a European Union program” that subsidizes the creation of activities for young people in the countryside, the 61-year-old Harild said. “I applied for the money and I got it!”
Harild cleared some of the trees from his little hill and a year later, in 2007, the Bornholm Ski Hill opened, which he leased to the Bornholm Ski Friends association.
Before his ski hill existed, the association organized trips to major ski resorts in Europe, but thanks to about 40 volunteers, it now operates the three pistes built by Harild.
“Ole Harild received 733,000 kroner [US$131,000], half of it paid by the EU and the other half by the state” of Denmark, the head of the association Jesper Joern Jensen said.
Harild bought material to devise a makeshift ski lift and acquired a snow making machine for 310,000 kroner. He bought skis and boots for 400,000 kroner. And he built a chalet for visitors at a cost of 500,000 kroner. He also installed water and electricity on the slopes.
“All in all, it cost almost 2 million kroner. I paid the remainder myself,” he said.
Michael, a 24-year-old who usually travels to the Austrian or Italian Alps once a year to hit the slopes, is turning in his skis, out of breath, after visiting the ski hill for the first time.
“It’s perfect! There aren’t many places in Denmark where you can find this,” he said, adding: “I’m coming back tomorrow!”
Claus, a 46-year-old father of four who moved to Bornholm from Copenhagen seven years ago because of the island’s natural beauty, said the ski hill only cemented his conviction that he had made the right decision.
“Of course, there was no ski slope when I came to Bornholm, but this place gives me at least one reason not to move back [to Copenhagen],” he said.
The Bornholm slopes were open for 35 days in 2010 and the current season opened on Jan. 29 after three days of snowmaking with the cannon.
On average, about 2,000 people visit the ski hill each year, Jensen said.
A one-day lift card for adults costs 300 kroner, including ski rental, giving the association a profit of 15,000 kroner last year, according to treasurer Kim Pedersen.
“We’re keeping this money to buy a button lift,” he said.
The current ski lift is a wire that runs between two pulleys, hooked up to the trees that line the piste. Skiers hold on to a loop and some, especially youngsters, have difficulty hanging on.
“A lot of people, especially young teens, don’t have enough strength in their arms” and they find it too hard so they don’t come back, said Harild, who added that a real lift would help boost the number of visitors.
“We’ve found a second-hand button lift in Austria for 900,000 kroner,” Jensen said.
The association has already received some pledges to help finance its acquisition, including 200,000 kroner from the EU and 200,000 from the Danish state.
“But we’re still short 300,000 kroner” that needs to be raised by April if the association wants to buy the lift, Jensen said.
However, does one really need to invest so much money on an island so clearly ill-adapted to the purpose and which counts barely 41,500 inhabitants?
“Yes,” said Bjarne, a 61-year-old beginner, as he cursed the rudimentary ski lift.
“We need to have winter activities here or else everyone will move away” and Bornholm will become “a dead island,” he said.
For Christian, who has brought his three-and-a-half year-old son Anton to learn to ski, Harild’s hill is “not so big,” but it’s enough “for kids to learn on.”
Anton is in heaven as he makes his way down the hill wedged between his dad’s skis.
At the bottom of the hill, four-year-old Frederik is less keen and wants to go home. His grandfather, Joergen, said he’ll come back with the youngster another time “so he’ll be ready for the real mountains in Sweden or Austria.”
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion