Twenty Five Winters Deep

It’s the last day of April 2026 and I’m on my way back to Bourg St. Maurice from the Spring Break snowboard test which took place in Kaunertal, Austria. My first time there (though not the first time a Cool Bus has been but that’s another story!) and I had ummed and ahhed before deciding to make the 9 hour trip across the Alps. It’s an odd concept, taking a holiday to an Austrian ski resort at the end of a long winter season in a French ski resort but in the end, thoughts of testing out a bunch of next years kit, and meeting and riding with a load of new people swung it. Happy to say it was the right decision. 

Kaunertal is a very different resort to those on our side of the Alps. It’s a half hour drive up from the main town to the lift station at 2700 metres and from there, modern lifts whisk you up to three separate peaks over 3000 metres. You can ski all the way down to the lower chairlift at 2300 metres from all of these. This high altitude means, even at the end of April, it has a ton of amazing terrain including super wide pistes for carving, a professional snow park and loads of easily accessible freeride terrain. We even got freshies on the last day.

The board test has been running for 35+ years. It dates back to the Snowboard UK magazine era, first published back in 1991. The annual result was the Snowboard UK Bible, a comprehensive kit review which hit magazine racks in the autumn. It’s something I used to pick up from WHSmiths all through the 90’s so to finally visit in person brought a sense of nostalgia, not least for the fact that I actually got to meet a load of people who’s names I first read in the magazines pages as a teenager.

Continuing in the vein of reminiscence, we should probably talk about the fact that the 1st May also marks the end of the 25th winter season of Cool Bus providing private airport transfers in the French Alps. The last quarter of a century has been a helluva journey with ups and downs all along the way. I reckon we’ve driven close to ten million kilometres but it’s the last few that we are most proud of. As well as being our twenty fifth winter it was also our tenth providing electric airport transfers. 

Since November 2016 we have driven 1.6 million electrically powered kilometres across three Tesla’s and seven Mercedes. Earlier this winter we did a pretty accurate break down of the CO2 savings our electric vehicles were capable of, taking into account the manufacturing emissions involved in producing the batteries (read about that here). With this information we can be fairly confident with a total of 300 metric tonnes of CO2 saved versus using diesel vehicles over the last ten years. This season alone we have clocked 300,000 km, equivalent to a saving of 56 metric tonnes of CO2.

Easy to throw figures like this around but does that number really mean anything to you? What does 56 tonnes equate to? 

Well it’s the same annual amount of CO2 as produced by 4.5 average UK households. The average UK household contains 2.35 people and this figure includes heating, hot water, running appliances, private car travel and the the emissions produced for food production. So you could say our savings equate to reducing the UK population by 10.5 people.

It is also roughly equivalent to 200 return, European short haul flights. Now obviously the majority of our clients arrive in the Alps by plane. A very busy Easyjet flight will carry 180 people. Travel by train from the UK to the Alps produces 80-90% less emissions than flying. So you could say that our annual emissions savings is equivalent to a full plane load of skiers choosing to take a return train to the Alps instead of flying.

You would need a forest containing around 2000 mature trees to absorb that much CO2 in one year. A mature forest generally contains 50 trees per acre so our emissions savings over a year is the same as would be sequestered by 40 acres of forest, equivalent to 25 football pitches.

Finally, a Sodatream refill cylinder contains 450g of CO2 and can make 60 litres of carbonated beverage. The amount of CO2 we save in one year is therefore enough to make 1,539,000 litres of cherryade. That’s what I call getting very busy with the fizzy

Any clearer?

Now I’m sure you’re thinking, when’s the big 25th party? Good question. While we did celebrate the end of our 10th winter season in April 2011 we decided to celebrate our 25th on the actually anniversary, that’ll be January 2027 (I drove my first airport transfer in January 2002). Fear not, there will be plenty of fanfare, a load of ramblings from me and a party or two 😉 Stay tuned for more info through the summer months.