Jeremy Mortimer wrote:
funkraum wrote in

"Edi" wrote:

[...]
My dodgy generalisation is that the US resorts probably have shorter
runs, lower vertical drops but at least do have more of the white
stuff which is always useful if you want to slide down it.


Alps were glaciated. Rockies were not.

I think you'll find they were. Further north, they still are.


You don't say !

I think the ice sheet descended as far as a latitude something like
the lower border of Ohio - I was very young at the time. Hence the
obtuse piles-of-rubble look of the lower Rockies, with the absence of
hanging valleys and the omission of the evil-looking scalloped flanks
in the fashion of the Weisshorn.


Gives different terrain. The
slopes of the Rockies are wider, hence US skiers express surprise at
the number of catwalks in European resorts (which are bulldozed into
the mountain to enable easy transit).

I'm not sure where you're thinking of, but I wonder if some of these aren't
actually roads, or at least forestry tracks. Many of these become pistes in
winter.


Various. Many were/are tracks/roads, many have been bulldozed. I
came up behind the bulldozing-in-progress once below Lac des Vaux at
Verbier.


In other places short sections have been leveled to cross steep
areas, some of which are the sides of U-shaped valleys - certainly the
result of glaciation. Are there no U-shaped valleys in the Rockies?


They tend to look like this top photo:

http://academic.emporia.edu/aberjame...ocky/rocky.htm

Nice enough, but not the sci-fi book cover vertigineity of something
like the Lauterbrunnen valley (Wengen-Mürren) up at Gimmelwald.

http://images.google.de/images?q=lau...r=&sa=N&tab=wi


Since the Rockies run from Alaska to New Mexico and so you could find
whatever you are looking for, somewhere.