Rigi, CH 03/10/16

jamesdeluxe

Administrator
For the second to last day of my trip, I drove 20 minutes to a well-known attraction called Rigi (REE-ghee) that I’d been looking forward to checking out. Nicknamed “Queen of the Mountains,” it’s geologically both a massive and a peninsula: almost completely surrounded by three different lakes. Moreover, Rigi was home to the very first cog railway in Europe, built in 1871. There are two different railways that provide access from the valley floor, so that was a big draw for me.

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I parked in the village of Goldau, where you catch hourly departures. Here's a family with their wooden sleds, which are hugely popular in German-speaking regions; in fact, they're a major profit center for ski areas:
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Just like in France, dogs are brought along on all sorts of outings:
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The regional ski pass that I bought includes the Rigi Railway, which was a nice bonus. Our train arriving:
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Sleds (or sledges for UKers) get their own car:
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For those who've never seen a cog railway up close (I hadn't), this is what it looks like. A wheel with teeth on the middle rail pulls the train up steep terrain:
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Here's the dashboard -- the steering wheel is for controlling the speed:
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In addition to staring at the incredible surroundings, in winter you can also go snowshoeing, sledding, sleigh riding, and skating, along with cross-country and alpine skiing. There are three separate comparatively small downhill skiing sectors. Locals advised me that the slopes were a mostly intermediate affair and that Rigi’s a place you go not for challenging terrain; rather, to ski through a stunning landscape -- and wow were they correct.

40 minutes later, we arrived at the summit sector called Rigi Kulm. Interestingly, in Abraham Cahan's 1917 novel The Rise of David Levinsky, there’s a hostel in New York's Catskills called Rigi Kulm.
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My Kästle skis ready to be pulled off the train:
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Several hundred very chic, prosperous-looking Chinese university students -- all dressed like movie stars in training -- were already up there on what looked like a class excursion.
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View from the summit to the west:
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From there, I clicked into my skis and headed downhill to the trails.
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At times, you could see a clear inversion with wood-stove smog:
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Throughout the day, you're always interacting with the trains by skiing alongside or crossing tracks:
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You have to be careful not to be too distracted by the views just to your right. This is the smallest of the three lakes surrounding Rigi:
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The vertical in this sector is 1,300 feet and most of the trails were easy blues, but conditions were spectacular, with the blazing sun warming up the snow to a perfect buttery consistency in the cold temps:
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There are no signs or a crossing guard alerting you that you're skiing across active train tracks -- you're supposed to know better. An interesting sensation for Americans accustomed to living in a nanny state: to be treated like an adult:
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The bottom of a north-facing section with soft chop from the storm three days earlier:
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I lapped it about ten times along with this guy:
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Yep, the snow was cold and dry:
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Gorgeous groomers:
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And more jaw-dropping views -- exactly what we expect Switzerland to be like:
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I went around a corner and here was this guy lounging in the sun:
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Those first tracks up top are lift-served. Unfortunately, I ran out of time to take the train to that sector:
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I had a 4 pm appointment at my hotel for drinks with the owners and thus had to bail by 3 pm. Here's my final run: racing downhill to catch this train back to the valley:
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