Flims/Laax, Switz. Jan. 30, 2013

Tony Crocker

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We stayed by a small lake in Laax village which does not have its own ski lift. We took the first bus to Falera, which is the smallest and westernmost base to get up the mountain. We took a scenic warmup run there. The easy piste winds among cattle sheds.
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Up to Cornius, we took a busy high speed quad up to Crap Sogn Gion, a subpeak at 7,300 feet which is fairly central to the Laax ski complex. There was an obvious piste down to the Alps Dado and we immediately realized Flims/Laax’s south exposure problem. At 10:30AM the piste was already scraped with hard spots, and skier density was quite high. We asked later and found that some schools in Germany and Switzerland were out, yet we had seen no evidence of this at Davos/Klosters.

We left that area and took a long catwalk to Fuorcla, where a long gondola ascends from 6,900 to 8,500 feet.
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There’s along lazy run down that gondola.
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It’s still south facing, but it’s high and not steep so the snow was good packed powder. You can see from the pics that there’s sastrugi off-piste as it’s a windswept area. Speaking of which, the Vorab glacier T-bar up to 9,900, the La Siala chair up to 9,200 and Lavidinas chair on the upper west side of Laax to 8,300 were all closed due allegedly to wind. Only the top of La Siala showed evidence of wind (plume from its peak visible behind me at noon).
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Elsewhere wind seemed to be minimal and that La Siala plume subsided around 1PM. At any rate we skied both sides of that Fuorcla gondola, and the runs coming to it from Crap Masegn are short but north facing with good pitch. We also took a run on the east facing Treis Palas chair which was packed powder on top but hard pack on its lower steeper section. Back up the long gondola we skied a long 3,000 vertical run down to Plaun, the lower quarter or so was now sun softened spring snow at a bit past noon. We took the gondola up to Nagens and a couple of laps on Mutta Rodunda. The latter chair was also in fairly decent spring mode, better than the hardpack of the morning but not what one would expect of the Alps at 6,300-7,900 feet in January. I ventured under the lift off-piste here and made one of these tracks.
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It was now close to 2PM so we went in for a short break, the usual bowl of soup for me. I went out soon on my own to check out the Flims side. I first saw this interesting single ski with binding mounted in water ski mode.
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From Mutta Rodunda there’s a scenic piste partially shaded to the top of the Grauberg tram and finally to its base 2,000 feet lower. View down to Flims from that Grauberg piste.
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I descended all the way to Flims and took 2 chairs up to Naraus. On the ride up are a mix of houses and farms; note the 3 horses by one of the houses.
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Farther up were cattle sheds and several cattle in nearby pens.

From Naraus a tram goes up to Cassons at 8,700 feet, but it is probably open once in a blue moon as there are no pistes and the relative steep “freeride runs” face due south of course. I skied back to Flims in quite heavy spring snow, and since it was now 3:45 and I had skied 21,100 vertical I thought it best to quit and take the bus from there. Here my luck with public transit ran out, as I misinterpreted bus signs twice and wound up taking 3 buses and an hour to get back to the hotel.

The somewhat negative tone of this report is mainly relative to our prior stops on this trip in the Arlberg and Davos/Klosters. Flims/Laax has a modern well integrated lift system, and only the long side of the Fuorcla gondola had wait times of 5 minutes or more despite there being lots of people. The skiing is mostly intermediate, but I knew that before I came. I also knew the sunny exposure but did not expect that it would be well over half south facing and thus so limited in off-piste potential with no recent snow. I was also a bit peeved that several upper lifts that might have better snow were closed in weather that was balmy by Mammoth standards. I also realized that buying a 2-day lift ticket might have been a risky move. An overcast day would be very unpleasant here with bad visibility and bulletproof snow.
 
Tony Crocker":2yrkp2dq said:
The somewhat negative tone of this report
Your Euro TRs have had a far more, um, "measured" tone than mine. Mostly because your writing is more facts/figures-based and mine is more impressionist.

In any event, the pix are purdy.
 
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