A true winter classic

I'm about to launch down the St. Moritz-Celerina Olympic bobrun, the oldest bobsleigh track in the world, and I'm having second thoughts. For a split second, as I struggle to pull the racing balaclava over my face, everything is dark and a montage of bobsleigh's greatest wipeouts runs through my mind: bodies flying, sleds smashing, limbs breaking.

"Keep your head up," the driver shouts at me through my enormous helmet. "The G forces are so strong you won't be able to lift it at all otherwise. And keep your shoulders hunched so your head doesn't bounce around like a rag doll."

With those inspiring words, we're off. Within seconds we're pushing 135 kilometres an hour and pulling 4 Gs, enough to elicit deep, involuntary grunts, as we race through the tightest corners. This, it occurs to me, was not what I expected of this trip at all.

Arriving in the Engadine was a considerably more subdued affair. Just a couple of days ago I was sitting quietly in a train car winding my way through the Domleschg valley, a green and pleasant place of small, quaint villages and medieval castles. I spent two nights nursing my jet lag in the nearby village of Pontresina, at the neo-baroque wedding cake known as the Grand Hotel Kronenhof. How simple it all seemed then, dining on pressed duck in the Kronenstubli restaurant, floating mindlessly in the saltwater grotto, watching the figure skaters pirouette on the hotel's ice rink.

By the time I got to St. Moritz I was happy to slide into the relaxed rhythm of the place. For all of its glamour there's almost no sense of urgency. The Bogner- and Moncler-clad visitors linger over pastries and coffee at Cafe Hanselmann, take their tiny dogs window-shopping along Via Maistra and load designer shopping bags full of loot into idling Q7s.

I took a lap around the dynamic timber-clad bubble of Sir Norman Foster's Chesa Futura (Future House), one of the most beautiful apartment buildings on Earth. One afternoon, I spent close to an hour at the new Vito Schnabel gallery just watching Urs Fischer's life-sized wax sculptures melt slowly in on themselves.

Those were the kinds of luxurious, restorative things I'd imagined the Swiss Alps would be all about, but I've come to learn St. Moritz takes its winter fun very seriously. The area's got a reputation to uphold, after all. This is where winter tourism as we know it was invented.

"For 300 years, people have been coming to this valley as a summer resort," Heinz E. Hunkeler, the dapper hotelier of the Kulm Hotel told me over dinner one evening at the K restaurant. "Then in 1856 you have Badrutt, a small hotelier from Simaden, who purchases a little pension called the Pension Faller and begins to turn it into the 100-room luxury hotel you see today. It almost didn't happen, though, because in 1864 he'd realized it was difficult for a hotelier to survive on just a short summer season, so at the end of that year he sat down with his last four guests, a group of British aristocrats, and made them an offer."

Badrutt proposed that the group come back to spend the winter. The guests, for whom winter in England was dark and dreary, thought he was mad. He explained that winter in St. Moritz was nothing like what they were used to. It was sunny nearly the whole time and you could sit outside in shorts and a shirt. The guests were still incredulous, so he made them a bet: If they came back and found that what he said was true, they were welcome to stay as long as they liked, and if not, he'd reimburse them all of their travel expenses.

"They came back in December and stayed until May," Hunkeler explained. "When they went back to England looking great, their friends were like, 'Where have you guys been?' They said, 'We were in Kulm in St. Moritz.' The next year more people came and still more the year after that and that's how winter tourism was brought to life."

Initially, apart from some bright, sunny weather, there wasn't really much to do. Skiing was a niche sport in the late 1870s, so most tourists entertained themselves with reading, ice skating and mountain hikes. The Scottish game of curling was imported later in the decade and by the 1880s tobogganing, a new-found sport from Canada, became all the rage. That led to the development of the Cresta Run, the first ever competitive sled-racing track, one that is still hand-built every winter and continues to draw racers today.

The Kulm Hotel was central to the development of all of those sports. The property's vast grounds were the site of many of the events, including the bobsleigh, skeleton and ice skating competitions, during the first-ever Winter Olympics – yes, those were inaugurated here, too – in 1928.

My room, along with most of the others, was unveiled in early 2016. Designed by Pierre-Yves Rochon with floor-to-ceiling pine walls, black stone bathroom and lacquered cabinets, it overlooked the frozen expanse of Lake St. Moritz. From here, I watched the teams clear snow and set up the tents ahead of the annual Snow Polo Tournament, another winter sport that was invented here.

Winter sports aren't the only innovation St. Moritz brought to the mountains, either. "In the sixties, the only alpine food you could get anywhere was soup or a sausage or a plate of spaghetti," chef Reto Mathis of the restaurant La Marmite, told me one afternoon over lunch.

"Back then, my father decided that he wanted to cook the food that inspired him as a chef, so he divided the dining room in two and had self-service on one side and gourmet food on the other. People thought he was crazy. They didn't think anyone would go out to eat gourmet food on the side of a mountain. They started to make bets as to when he would go bankrupt."

Nearly 50 years later that still hasn't happened and La Marmite is considered one of the most iconic, and expensive, mountain restaurants in the world. The location, nearly 2,500 metres up the side of Corviglia, does not prevent it from stocking and proudly displaying some of the rarest and most sought-after delicacies in the world. A giant bowl brimming with deeply aromatic white truffles sits next to an ice-filled trolley holding beautiful glistening fish and tin upon tin of caviar. We eat lobster linguine, devour tarte flambée buried under truffles and chase foie gras with Sauternes. Between bites we admire the exotic, fur-clad clientele as much as the view. I don't know if it's the chasselas or the pinot noir, the abundance of truffles or the altitude, but the whole lunch feels so long ago, like it was a dream …

And just like that, the brakeman drops the anchor and the bobsled rattles loudly to a stop. It has taken just more than a minute for us to cover the 1,722 metres. We're upright. All of my parts seem to still be attached. I'm elated. There's a glass of Champagne – this is St. Moritz, after all – and I'm ready to do it again.

The writer travelled as a guest of the Kulm Hotel. It did not review or approve this article.

If you go

Air Canada and Swiss Air offer direct flights to Zurich where Swiss Rail operates trains directly from the airport to St. Moritz.

Where to Stay

Kulm Hotel St. Moritz, 7500 St. Moritz, Switzerland, Tel 41 81 836 80 00, rooms from $525; kulm.com

Grand Hotel Kronenhof Pontresina, 7504 Pontresina - St. Moritz, Switzerland, Tel 41 81 830 30 30, rooms from $500; kronenhof.com/en.html

Where to Dine

Kuhstall: A working cow barn in the winter and the only restaurant on Earth worth hiking 30 minutes up the side of a mountain in the dark carrying a burning torch in the winter. Must be experienced to be believed; engadin.stmoritz.ch/winter/en/gastronomie/kuhstall