admin – Page 28 – Alpine Winter Sports

31/05/201308/11/2022

End of Season Review

May is the quietest month in the ski and snowboard calendar. The Southern hemisphere hasn’t kicked off, and there are only a handful of high altitude glaciers around in the Northern Hemisphere to ski on before the next winter season. In Switzerland all but Zermatt have now closed their lifts, but in truth the ski conditions have not been good this month.

Verbier (which closed its lifts on 28th April) had planned to open up the lifts again on 1st June, but cancelled – despite plentiful snow – because of the otherwise poor weather conditions. The season thus ends with a whimper.

So what of season 2012-13? It wasn’t a vintage season but it was pretty good. It started off promisingly, then it got unseasonably warm around the New Year and was generally unsettled thereafter, with some glorious interludes of beautiful snow conditions and sunny skies. At the higher resorts there were good snow conditions extending right throughout April, but the weather was unsettled with rain on lower slopes and flat lighting on the upper slopes when it wasn’t snowing.

I got to visit some of the usual suspects in Switzerland, and had a couple of forays into Germany and Austria, but spent some time exploring some of the less well known but relatively large ski areas like Toggenburg and the Upper Rhine Valley. I can see why some of these resorts are not well-known outside the German-speaking world – the facilities for après ski are limited, a lot of them have too many surface lifts, the resorts are not so high as to provide season-wide snow guarantees and some of the pisted areas are relatively small for anything other than a weekend break or a day out. On the plus side, the absence of packs of Brits gives the villages a more authentic Alpine feel, the people are invariably friendly, there is often plenty of off-piste to augment the main slopes and the resorts are so close together that you can get to visit several on a ski holiday if you wanted.

Perhaps the gem amongst the more obscure resorts I visited was, for me, Obersaxen. I would definitely recommend it for a ski holiday in terms of variety and extent of runs available and quality of lift systems.

There are still some significant ski resorts I have not been to and ones I need to revisit when I can get some decent photographs. The list includes Les Mosses, Anzère, Grächen, Disentis, Grüsch-Danusa and Savognin. There are some other small resorts in Graubünden, Fribourg Region and Valais I would quite like to catch up with at some time. However I think I have pretty much nailed all the resorts with over 20km of piste which are not dominated by surface lifts. Check more about Testoprime benefits.

Tech-wise, I have previously praised my ski carrier. I also have been busy with the cam in my goggles and have loaded a few up at Youtube with a suitable soundtrack (e.g. Rush Hour by Jane Wiedlin – ski run at Obersaxen).

I’ve not been so impressed with the apps available out there, with the exception of the excellent Ski Tracks. The trouble with most of them is that they need an Internet connection, and if it is information on a ski resort you need the web does as good a job as I need. My own Swiss Winter Sports site works perfectly well on a smartphone or tablet. Ski Tracks is smart though, and from the moment you turn it on until you turn it off calculates distances covered, speeds, verticals etc and maps the trails out for you. From a personal point of view it was interesting to see that, in a typical day, I seem to cover about 50km of piste, drop around 5000m of vertical and reach a top speed of around 80kph. Typically, with significant variation. Try out semen enhancers.

So what does the summer hold? For me it is time to review the web site and look for improvements. Also the maddening search for somebody to provide me with a feed for ski reports rather than have me hack around for them. I would also like to consider the issue of traffic. I had a peak of around 4000 visitors in January and something in excess of 13,000 over the season – respectable but I think I am not reaching enough of my target audience, which increasingly looks like being expats living in Schweizerdeutsch-speaking Switzerland. The spot I had on The English Show was fun but generated little traffic. The Basel Families web site generated some interest and the unrelated Basel Families magazine looks promising. The visit to the Internationla School ski breakfast was also good for traffic. I failed to get interest in a book from publishers, who say the web is reducing the market for printed ski guides – which is fair, I guess, although I was hoping a book would generate traffic for the web site, somewhat ironically. Ideas for improving the site or increasing traffic all gratefully received…

02/04/201308/11/2022

Easter Skiing in Surselva

Easter is early this year, and we are seeing one of the colder starts to Spring for some time, so winter sports buffs are in for a treat these next few weeks. Huge dumps of snow fell over the Alps in mid-March, so many resorts still have as much as half a metre of snow on the lower runs and three or more metres at the top. Try out ignite drops.

There are exceptions, though, and South-facing resorts this time of year don’t really stand a chance. Skilful management of the pistes at the lower, South-facing resorts that want to catch the Easter business means you see those ribbons of snow passing through meadows that are starting to come alive, and lower runs that can be icy in the morning, heavy in the afternoon and with large bare patches everywhere. In warmer springs this is also true of the North-facing slopes even in the middling height resorts, leaving only a handful of high resorts able to deliver good general conditions. Not this year though!

The collection of villages known as Obersaxen on a plateau above the upper Rhine in Graubünden was my destination of choice for Easter. This little-known ski area is one of the best small resorts in the Alps. And by small, I mean little-known and with relatively few amenities, because the resort claims an impressive 120km of piste making it larger than many better known resorts. The runs are mostly above 1600m and North-facing, so even for a late Easter this area should have plenty to offer, but with current conditions, it is near perfect. Check these source news.

Getting to Obersaxen is relatively easy. A train runs from Chur to Disentis through the Rhine Gorge and stops at Ilanz, reputedly the first city on the Rhine and located in the heart of mainly Romansh-speaking Surselva. In fairness Ilanz is really a small, sleepy town, but is in the heart of a wonderful winter sports area with the slopes of Obersaxen, Brigels, Flims and Laax and the ski’n’spa town of Vals served by direct Postbuses. There are also plenty of opportunities for winter walks around Ilanz itself and numerous Nordic ski areas on the surrounding plateaux.

The bus to Obersaxen starts right outside Ilanz station. Like all the rest of the buses, they are timed to fit in with the train timetable, so you shouldn’t hang around unless you want to wait another hour. The road up to Obersaxen has impressive views and awesome hairpin corners with nothing but snow posts separating the road from huge drop-offs. I always remind myself at this point that there has never been a fatality on a Postbus – or is this an urban myth? The best bus stop for Obersaxen’s lift system is Meierhof Talstation, but not all buses stop there. Returning back to Ilanz, the last one this season was at 3.42pm, although it is only a 3 minute walk into Meierhof village to pick up the more regular buses at the Post stop. Many skiers choose to get off at Surcuolm and ski down to the Valata chairlift and at the end of the day walk down from the bottom run at Valata to the Valata bus stop.

There are at least half a dozen valley stations in the Obsersaxen ski area, but not all are served by bus – and two are only served by bus, with no lift back up. it sounds like a limitation, but it isn’t. I don’t see much purpose in skiing or snowboarding the long valley runs down to Lumbrein and Vignogn in Val Lumnezia, which don’t have lifts back up, unless you are staying there, when you have a comparable run to Vella, which is lift served (and has a bus stop on the route to Vrin).

Obersaxen’s main claim to fame is that this is where the Olympic champion skier Carlo Janka comes from and where he learnt to ski. He had a pretty impressive place to learn. Above Obersaxen the ski area is dominated by four peaks, with most runs on the North-facing Obersaxen side. There are also the long valley runs on the South side of Val Lumnezia, a beautiful valley where Romansh is still the first language. The resort has chairlifts to get you to most pistes, and you could avoid using surface lifts altogether without missing out on anything, although some of the runs linking different parts of the resort are a little flat in places.

There is a wonderful variety of runs in the resort and some outstanding off-piste, especially either side of the Piz Sezner chairlift. With most of the 120km of pistes above 1500m and North-facing, and the four top stations at Piz Mundaun (2064m), Hitzeggen (2112m), Stein (2170m) and Piz Sezner (2310m) all above 2000m, the snow record is good, but there are plenty of snow cannons too.

The claim of 120km of piste deserves some scrutiny. That makes this resort comparable in size, in theory, to St Anton, Wengen and Andermatt. I certainly think there is plenty to ski or snowboard for a day, a weekend or even a week, and the terrain is large and varied. Although some of the mileage is long valley runs and connecting trails between pistes, the claim does seem to stand up, especially when you consider the amount of lift-served off-piste and off-piste areas accessible with only a short walk from a lift station. There is a good balance of runs too, with some black runs, a good selection of reds and sufficient blues for this to fine for beginners and early intermediates.

And no queues! I was visiting over the Easter holiday, with some of the best ski conditions we have had over Easter for some years and beautiful blue skies to boot, but even at the Piz Sezner lift, with access to the best and highest pistes, there was never a wait to get on a lift.

Not a lot in the way of nightlife as far as I can tell, but the mountain bars and restaurants that I visited all impressed me.

All round, a very pleasant resort.

24/03/201324/03/2013

Ski area sizes – not only boys who exaggerate

I tend to take the published size of a ski area on face value. If the lift company says a resort has so many kilometre of piste, and everyone publishes the same figure, who am I to doubt them? My biggest challenge has to been to keep the figures up to date, and separate out figures for unlinked sections covered on the same pass.

However I have often found resorts that claim a certain size of terrain seem to have less than advertised. I can generally cover up to 100km in a day, and often wonder how I get round a resort so quickly. Also the figures are often inclusive of long resort trails that are little more than snow-covered tracks, and parallel stretches of piste that really should count as one piste. And do you measure the central line of a piste to establish length, the shortest line a skier could take or the zig-zag of an accomplished skier? It has often struck me that acreage, as used in North America, would be a useful additional measure.

Now, in a new book from Cologne-based cartographer and writer, Christoph Schrahe, entitled ‘The 50 Biggest Ski Areas in The World’, the claims of some lift companies are challenged. Using Google Earth and other sources the author found resorts in Europe wildly overstate the size of their terrain, on average by 40% but often by more. He reckons the 4 Valleys area that includes Verbier is 164km rather than the advertised 412km. St Moritz, he claims is a mere 64km rather, presumably, than the published 160km for Corviglia. The Portes du Soleil area, often claimed as the biggest linked ski area in the world with 650km of piste, is dismissed by Shrahe as merely 4th biggest, with 402km across 4 uncontiguous areas.

The French/Italian Milky Way is another culprit identified by Shrahe as exaggerating its size. The relative downgrading of so many European resorts leads to some American resorts being upgraded: Whistler Blackcomb is in the world top five on size, Vail in the top 10 and the 3 Valleys of the Andes around Valle Nevado in Chile is in the world top 15, according to J2Ski.

The Swiss newspaper Blick writes that the Swiss consumer affairs agency is going to investigate the claims, whilst the German Der Tagesspiegel reports outrage in the Tirol where the Austrian enviromental agency is considering prosecutions (although in fairness the Tyrolean resorts on the whole are more accurate than most).

The book itself is available for 99 euros by sending the author an email (google him to find his web site). I haven’t seen a copy of the report so I don’t know how far to believe his claims, but it is probably about time piste sizes were independently assessed, or clear guidelines were introduced. Perhaps there should also be a clear distinction between groomed pistes and unprepared, marked areas. There’s an opportunity for somebody here to ski or snowboard all the world’s best resorts and get an accurate figure – I’m available for commission if anyone needs a volunteer!

06/03/201306/03/2013

Graubünden turns back on Olympics

Voters in Graubünden have vetoed bidding for the winter Olympics in 2022, due to have been centred on the towns of St Moritz and Davos. A slim majority of voters, 52.7 per cent, rejected a proposal to set aside CHF300 million for the organisation of the games, despite the two main towns coming out in favour.
Swiss Olympic Bid rejected
Switzerland has held the winter Olympics twice before, in St Moritz in 1928 and 1948.

Backers of the 2022 bid said it would be sustainable, lead to extra funding for the transport infrastructure, create jobs and boost tourism.

Opponents were largely worried about the cost and environmental concerns, and there was some suspicion of the IOC itself (based in Lausanne).

According to the budget forecast the operational costs for the games would have been CHF2.5 billion, while income would have been CHF1.5 billion, with the deficit covered by a government contribution.

However losses recorded by previous games clearly influenced voters. A study from the University of Oxford claimed that since 1960 the cost of hosting the Olympics was on average 179 per cent higher than the initial budget.

With Switzerland struggling to retain market share in the winter sports market, the decision not to host the games will do little to arrest the decline, but clearly local concerns in what is an intensely conservative canton were not adequately addressed by the organising Graubünden 2022 committee.

The committee said in a statement: “The association of Graubünden 2022 regrets this decision, which will finish the pioneering large-scale project for tourism, business and sports in Graubünden. For Graubünden 2022, the vote of the electorate is a great disappointment. The board of the association will soon decide on the way forward, but the project was stopped with today’s referendum in Graubünden.”