There was a lot of snow promised for the end of last week which didn’t really seem to materialise. Friday evening was spend studying weather forecasts and radar images of precipitation to try to figure out where the best snow would be. I couldn’t figure out where to go so I decided to defer the decision until 8am on Saturday morning when the regional avalanche bulletins would be out.
I left home at 7am, and pulled into a motorway service station to meet a friend and check the updated information. The bulletin was showing 20-25cm of fresh snow in parts of northern of Graubunden. The area around Davos seemed to have gotten a good dump, but part of me wanted to go somewhere that I hadn’t been yet this year, and part of me was worried that there might be lift lines and crowds there. I figured Tschiertschen should have gotten some fresh snow too, so decided to head there.
Once we got to Tschiertschen the car park was empty and everywhere we looked there was fresh barely tracked powder just begging to be ridden. We put in a run after run off each of the lifts that were open and kept on finding new lines where there were little or no tracks.
At the end of the day we headed back to the car with very tired legs and big grins.
After reading Sundays avalanche report, which mentioned lots of avalanche activity on Saturday and hidden weak layers in the old snow underneath the fresh powder I decided Sundays activities needed to be somewhere uncrowded, controlled and not too steep so Pischa seemed to be the obvious option.
Once we got up to the area we bumped into a group of friends who we ended up riding with for the day. The snow conditions were as good as it gets, the weather was a little grey the visibility was good enough to ride without any problems. There were very few people, very few tracks and 30cm of perfect fresh powder. No further comment needed!
Two days of powder skiing directly accessed from the ski-lifts with no crowds anywhere to be seen! Now that’s a good weekend!
There is so much to be said for going a little off the beaten track and getting away from the big well known resorts.
