Montafon Valley is the Austrian mountain setting of Ernest Hemingway’s winter life around Schruns, where a modest family residence opened onto a landscape of farms, forest, high trails, and glaciers. The valley offers both a practical refuge and a hard-won sporting world: its climbs and snow conditions shape daily movement, while the return to Paris marks a lasting change in the narrator’s life.

Setting and Arrival

Schruns is reached by a small branch railway from Bludenz, after the train crosses Switzerland, reaches the Austrian frontier at Feldkirch, and passes through Liechtenstein. The branch follows a pebbly trout river through a valley of farms and forest to a sunny market town with sawmills, stores, inns, and a year-round hotel, the Taube. The route makes the valley feel both accessible and distinct from the cities left behind: rail travel delivers its residents to a settlement organized around the river, timber, and mountain terrain.

The Hemingway family lived at the Taube in large, comfortable rooms with big stoves, broad windows, substantial beds, and warm feather coverlets. Meals were simple and excellent, and both the dining room and wood-planked public bar were heated and welcoming. The pension cost about two dollars a day for three people. As the Austrian schilling declined over time, the cost of room and food fell; unlike the inflation in Germany, however, the change did not bring desperate poverty. The family’s life in Schruns was therefore inexpensive without being represented as deprivation.

Routes into the Mountains

The valley’s open floor led toward high country by logging and cattle trails. There were no ski lifts or funiculars: skiers climbed on seal skins attached to the bottoms of their skis, carrying themselves and their equipment upward. At the heads of the valleys stood Alpine Club huts used by summer climbers. Travelers could pay for wood they used, carry it themselves, or hire porters to take wood and supplies higher into the mountains and establish a base. The Madlener-Haus was among the huts associated with these expeditions.

The journey to the hut involved an overnight stop at an old inn, then an early climb in darkness with skis on shoulders. The narrator and his companions competed over who could carry the heaviest loads, but the porters outclimbed them. At the hut, built on a shelf beside a snow-covered glacier, the porters set down their burdens, pressed for more money than the agreed price, accepted a compromise, and sped away downhill on short skis. The episode gives the valley’s mountain travel a social as well as physical character: access depended on local labor, negotiated payment, and endurance, not on mechanical transport.

Snow, Skill, and Risk

Winter in Montafon Valley required close attention to conditions. The narrator recalled the different kinds of snow formed by wind and the hazards each presented on skis. In blizzards, even familiar terrain became an unknown landscape, and routes had to be chosen with exceptional care. On longer climbs, the party set out before daylight to avoid passing avalanche-prone places when the sun could make them dangerous. The mountain scenery was therefore never merely picturesque; its beauty came with specific, changing risks.

The effort culminated in a long glacier descent toward spring. Climbers built the strength and control for it through sustained ascents with heavy rucksacks; no ticket or purchase could replace that preparation. On the descent, the glacier seemed to run straight on without end, while speed, locked ankles, and the hiss of crisp powder condensed the winter’s labor into a single exhilarating passage. The valley’s geography structures this contrast between slow, burdensome ascent and swift downhill release.

Local Perception and the End of the Retreat

The foreign skiers did not see themselves as the local peasants saw them. Herr Lent told the narrator that people on the roads above Schruns had given him a nickname based on his beard, and at the upper end of Montafon, where porters were hired for trips toward the Madlener-Haus, the visitors were regarded as foreign devils who ventured into the high mountains when sensible people should stay away. Their pre-dawn starts, intended to reduce avalanche danger, did not persuade the locals otherwise. The valley thus held two different understandings of mountain travel: a chosen challenge for the visitors, and a transgression of dangerous terrain in the eyes of those who lived there.

In the memoir’s retrospective structure, Schruns becomes the setting for a temporary interval of work, family life, and strenuous pleasure. The narrator remembers the valley’s winter as happy and innocent in comparison with the nightmare winter and murderous summer that followed, after wealthy newcomers entered their lives. When Ernest Hemingway and his family returned to Paris in late spring, the trouble began again. They never returned to Vorarlberg, and neither did the rich. Montafon Valley consequently stands not only for a particular alpine landscape but for a period that could be remembered as secure precisely because it had ended.