St. Moritz

We headed out of the Bellinzona valley just as the weather closed in, great timing as that would mean more snow in the mountains! Our route would take us back into Italy (yay!) and up alongside Lake Como and then up through a steep mountain pass, back into the land of holey cheese. By the time we got to Lake Como in Italy it seem that winter had definitely left us as we spent an evening on the lake side in very summer like temperatures.

The next morning however things looked quite different and even at this height we could see that there had been some fresh snow on the surrounding hills. So we hit the road and made our way over an amazing mountain pass and into the Engardin valley.

Half way up the Maloja Pass

Wandering onto a frozen lake

We arrived at St Moritz, in the Engardin valley, the following afternoon, a great valley to arrive in as it’s about 1800m and has three large long lakes looming towards the centre. Each of them was still frozen and made a great welcome. We took a quick loop of St. Moritz town and were very unenthused by what we found, a lot of very big apartment block style hotels, completely lacking the charm of other alpine villages, and not much going on in downtown. This wasn’t going to be a town for any après ski fun by the looks of things.

The slopes at St. Moritz are widely spread out across the valley, so we opted to head for Corvatsch, which being on the less sunny side we figured would be in the best state this late in the season. The fresh snow that had fallen didn’t amount to as much as we had hoped and had quickly set. The glacier at the top was great but still surprisingly icy. We were also amazed to find ourselves forced to get on a slow T-bar lift to return from the main run of the field! From there it seemed to get worse and we found even more T-bar drag lifts servicing the rest of the mountain. Here, something like 5 of the total of 8 mountain lifts were Ts - not quite the ritz that we’d expected from St. Moritz!

T Bar valley - is this Turoa, New Zealand or St Moritz, Switzerland?

By lunch we’d exhausted all of the runs there and were not overly impressed. A few off piste runs left some nice scars on the bottom of our boards and it was quite iced up all round. So after chilling out and energising up in the van, we headed over to the city side of the mountain.

Much more fun to be had over the other side

Corviglia, which sits just above St. Moritz village, was all softened up and we ended up having a great time. The pistes were a lot wider and the off piste wasn’t hiding rocks as well as Corvatsch seemed to be able. The lower runs back gave us a taste of what the spring snow could become and we had a very slushy return back to the town with large mounds of soft moguls everywhere.
We had a look about the city but not much life here that we’d be interested in, the quietest après ski on record. We guessed the regular St Moritz visitors were après skiing it up in their five star hotels and restaurants, or sleeping off their lunches (the resort has the reputation for being very late up the mountain in the morning and very early off it – we figured most go up to partake of a boozy lunch in one of the many luxurious mountain restaurants and don’t make it back on piste). We felt very out of place in town in our snowboarding attire, a first for any alpine resort so far! Never mind, we certainly got the impression that for people who come here in winter, skiing isn’t the highest on their priorities.

On what was left of the home run back to St Moritz town