The hotelier was a gentle chap who spoke quietly at the best of times. But his voice dropped almost to a whisper when he said, hoarsely but firmly: 'I don't want the airport to be expanded.' The tourism officials, keen to promote 'the cross-country skiing capital of Europe' fixed their smiles and looked embarrassed.
'People are very worried about spoiling the valley. They do not want the mass market trampling over 500 years of Swiss mountain culture,' sales chief Ursula Maag admitted.
This is not an issue on the worldwide scale of Heathrow Terminal Five and Boeing 747s brushing the chimney pots. But there is probably almost as much money at stake - because this is about St Moritz. The marvellously moneyed fly in here in their private planes to pose on the powder snow, swipe platinum cards in designer emporiums and shell out £300 per person per night - or £2,000 for New Year's Eve 1999 - on the leading hotels.
The only other ways to get here are either a tortuous five-hour, four-wheel drive from Milan or an all-day journey by air to Zurich and then on the Glacier Express train, involving spectacular scenery but lots of changes.
This relative isolation keeps St Moritz glamorous and its outlying villages parochial. But there is a plan afoot to enlarge the tiny local airport in three years' time to accommodate normal holiday flights.
This would put the plebs amongst the pukka, which does not bother the hotelier, Giachem Arquint, in the slightest. But it would also spread the masses up and down the valley and, sitting in the tiny village of Zuoz, 12 miles up the road, where he runs a family hotel and has lived in tranquility for 70 years, this bothers him immensely. As the planning authorities plot and dither, he tries to hide his worries, and Arquint's mantra remains: 'Cheer up, it may never happen.'
There is much to lose. Zuoz is one of a string of small, riverside villages, where cross-country skiers glide up for a coffee as they make their way along the broad and beautiful trails of the Engadine Valley in the south-eastern Swiss Alps. The trails are often deserted.
In these ancient hamlets there are no high rises, chalet parks, supermarkets or the sort of bar for types who come down off the slopes, get instantly smashed and dance the night away on the tables in their ski boots.
The houses are etched with frescoes of mermaids, lions, horses and snowflakes, and residents speak the least known of the four Swiss national languages, the Latinesque Romansch. The churches are steeply spired, and huge barns exude real animal smells.
About the loudest noise to be heard in Zuoz is the outbreak of modest cheering at the end of a curling match. Curling (bowls on ice with funny brushes) sits on the winter sports menu alongside snow-shoeing, riverside walking, skating, tobogganing and cross-country skiing. Zuoz residents firmly believe that snow was not invented exclusively for the downhill skier to enjoy. The village has only a paltry array of runs that will keep a moderate to intermediate skier busy for less than a day. But Zuoz desperately does not want to be bypassed by the downhill and snowboard camps. It is part of a valley-long common ski pass scheme that allows downhill skiers to use all the lifts and pistes in the Upper Engadine for one price, which includes bus and train travel between the clustered villages.
If you want St Moritz without the glitz you can stay in a hide away such as Zuoz and take the 20-minute train ride to the star-studded slopes to ski, or try a different resort every day. This arrangement also appeals if you want a half downhill, half cross-country holiday, or you want one and your partner wants the other - but you do actually want to go on holiday together and stay in the same hotel.
If vertical skiing is adrenaline, bruises and danger, cross-country is stamina and the sort of slow-burn aches that prompt tears in the evening when lifting your legs into a hot bath.
The only real dangers you need fear are either getting exhausted before reaching the next drink of hot chocolate, or getting lost. The former depends on your fitness and rhythm. But it is encouraging to note that some hostelries are less than a mile apart, and it is easy to ski out from the village and get the bus back.
The risk of the latter is negligible. The valley is wide and open, and most skiers follow the banks of the River Inn (as in Innsbruck, in neighbouring Austria), which is too fast-flowing to freeze, and instead smokes in the early morning sun.
Some fit local cross-country skiers actually leg it part of the way up the mountain on trails with gradients that would make a tourist feel sick just to look at them.
The best way for the ingénue to get into the hillside forests that make up the only national park in Switzerland is to hire snow shoes. These are basically plastic, strap-on versions of tennis rackets, and make plodding around on the surface of the thigh-deep snow - and leaving yeti-sized footprints - a doddle.
In between snow-shoe paces there is absolute silence in the woods around Zuoz. They are full of red deer, chamois goat antelope, ibex, hares and foxes. Some may be glimpsed in a quiet moment, apparently, but most just leave tantalising footprints in the snow.
Down the valley the private jets are buzzing in and out of St Moritz, dropping off the privileged to play cricket and polo on the ice and display Armani clothes on the slopes.
Just a few miles apart, both are in their own, very different little worlds with one thing in common - they want to stay that way.
• Joanna Walters travelled with Inntravel (01653 629010). A week at the four-star Posthotel Engiadina in Zuoz costs from about £614 per person in a shared double/twin room. This includes half board, return scheduled flights from Gatwick to Zurich, a spectacular journey on the famous Glacier Express railway line, private taxi transfers to the hotel and a cross-country ski permit lasting throughout your stay.
