Season Diary - Day 12

Henry

Jan 102 min read

Updated: Jan 14

Friday 10 January, 2025

The first turns - intentionally at least - in Switzerland as we head for the resort of Laax.

To be honest, I'd built Laax up in my head to such an extent that I knew, when I finally came here, it would always be a disappointment.

All this talk about freestyle, greenstyle, lifestyle, Switzerland, Swiss prices, Swiss trains, crap snow, and on-demand ski gondolas meant I had built up a perfect picture in my head of what to expect and I knew already what to write about. Indeed, I had already written about various aspects of this resort a plethora of times in the past, be it updating resort pages or extolling the virtues of their new Flems Express on-demand gondola.

I don't often swear on this blog, but fuck me was I wrong.

Laax is all of the above. It is everything you've read about and seen on instagram and believed a Swiss ski resort to be. But to see it in real life is to witness an astonishing self-belief in what skiing - and snowboarding - can be that it defies anything the written word can say.

Laax is a resort that believes in freestyle like nowhere else. Yeah, sure, it has the world's largest half-pipe. But its designers and builders go on to build half-pipes for resorts around the world and have built the Olympic half-pipe in host resorts for the last twenty years.

Its youngsters get to spend their winters, when not on snow, three storeys underground in a purpose built skate-scoot-trampoline-parkour Eden, perfecting their flippy whizzy shit before taking it to the slopes, or just having fun. Adults can join in, too, with dedicated sessions once the prying scorning eyes of youth have been kicked out for the night.

The core of the resort is this cluster of new build-eco friendly high-tech flats, bars, and restaurants. Almost the entire old resort - if there even was one - has been torn down and rebuilt into this ultra modern pocket of indy, steezy, youthful renaissance ... perfection.

To say I've been completely blown away by Laax is an understatement. In truth, I set out this morning with impossibly high standards of what a "good" ski resort should be. And the definition of those standards has been completely blown out of the water. And I've not even touched on the skiing yet ...

Somehow, somewhere, I promised someone an article or two on Laax. And belive me, dear constant reader, I have no idea what the fuck I'm going to say.