Season Diary - Day 13
Updated: Jan 12
Saturday 11 January , 2025
Lies, lies, and damn lies - silver linings abound on Skiing Unlocked's last day in Laax, Switzerland.
It's slightly awkward when you lie in a video snow report for the UK's largest and only remaining newspaper with a dedicated snowsports section about the amount of snow forecast.
Viewers of the Daily Telegraph's snow report yesterday would have seen me assure them of only about 10cm of fresh snow down at Laax, in the far southeastern corner of Switzerland.
Instead we woke up to about a foot.
Whoops.
Ah well, no regrets here, there's skiing to be had!
And what a ski we had. A bluebird powder day is something to be savoured, and savour we did. The cloud was still loitering around 2,000m as we made our first turns, but I dove off the side of the piste and allowed the joy to overcome me.
This was serious powder. Jappow powder. It had been cold, really cold, and the snow had swept in from the north, all the way from the Arctic and Scandinavia. As a result, it was impossibly light and fluffy, just perfect to surf through and see it fly up around your waist and higher.
Yesterday I had fallen in love with Laax as a resort, now it was time to fall in love with Laax as a ski area.
There is some seriously surprising vertical available here, with a base at 1,000m and the highest point on the Vorab glacier hitting just above 3,000m. It's not what you would necessarily expect given some of the more ... demure resorts in this part of the world.
The main mountain hub is at Crap Sogn Gion - St John's Peak in the local Romansch language - at 2,000m. Incredibly views from the spaceship Galaaxy building look out over the insanely huge halfpipe, the ski area up and down from us, and the rock formations in the distance where the African and Eurasian plates meet - you can actually see the split in the mountainside where this meeting happens: how utterly cool is that, right? Geology rocks.
Laax probably isn't at the top of many people's lists for freeride terrain - that belongs to Grindelwald, Andermatt, and Zermatt, at least in Switzerland. But there is some super cool mellow terrain that is just perfect for lapping again and again and again. So that's what we did.
The blues beckoned us down from Crap Sogn Gion (pronounced Crap San Jean, by the way), and high above Nagens there were several choices between and around the reds and blacks, alongside the only itinerary route on the mountain. These needed just a little bit more snow to be ready to rock and roll, but the pistes around them were in excellent condition nonetheless.
Despite its image as a place to come and fool around on snow, I get the impression that Laax is a serious ski area for serious skiers. I guess at the end of the day we are in Switzerland, but even so, these two days have driven home the commitment to excellence that Laax is clearly striving towards.
Laax is modern, shiny, new and innovative. It is also, pure and simply, an excellent place to ski.
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