Let me just start by saying that we did not take any pictures this weekend. We brought the cell phone along to take some but our cell phone has not been working well lately and it decided it didn't want to work this past weekend at all. Sorry.
This past weekend we went skiing/snowboarding in the Alps. We managed to pick a weekend where there hadn't been fresh snow in about a week in the mountains so both resorts that we went to did not have very much snow. Some of the trails had rocks and grass and whatnot in them so we had to avoid some of the trails.
On Saturday we went to Flims-Laax. I wasn't a big fan of it there. There were gorgeous views from it, which I loved, but the slopes all faced South. When ski slopes face South they sit in the sun all day long and so every day the snow on the slopes melts and then at night it refreezes into ice so when you try to ski on it the next morning you're trying to ski on a sheet of ice. On slopes that face in the other directions, the snow that falls remains powdery or at least soft ... it might become packed down but it does not turn into ice.
The other issue with Flims-Laax was that it had a lot of flat terrain. It had a lot of steeper terrain as well, but all the easier trails were traverses which don't work for snowboarders. So I had a pretty miserable time wandering around there until I found a trail that I liked that wasn't a traverse. It's funny because Flims is known as a snowboarder's paradise but I think it's just because it has a lot of terrain parks for snowboarders, not because of it's trails for sure.
On Sunday we went to Andermatt. This would have been great except the mountains were in the clouds for most of the day. It's really hard to ski down a trail when you're in a cloud because everything is white and you can't see a thing or make out any features anywhere.
Another thing about resorts in Switzerland is that they're really spread out and do not have as many trails in them as American resorts do. You might have 3-4 different bases and peaks at a resort here but only a few trails on each, and they are not really labeled at all either. Here is the trail map for Andermatt:
For reference, Andermatt is on the left, the town there, and we started near the red cross on the upper right side of the town.
Interestingly, at Andermatt, you had to take a train to get from one base to another. And of course we have to park at Andermatt and all the trails I really liked (the wide open blue squares) were two bases/train stops away. On the bright side, I found some trails that I really enjoyed at Andermatt, it's just a matter of driving there, parking, and then getting onto a train for 20 minutes to get to them. But since I didn't find any runs I really liked at Flims-Laax, I would be happy to go back to Andermatt and take the train to be able to snowboard on trails that I enjoy. We also managed to come out of the clouds for a few hours while we were there and to find some nice soft snow so overall I'd say Andermatt was a better experience than Flims-Laax.
One thing I liked about the resorts was that they both had walking trails across the mountains. At Flims-Laax, these trails were nice groomed trails through the forests that you could just wander around on, on foot. You can't really find that in the US. Andermatt had a lot of sledding trails (again, right on the slopes with the skiers but they had their own trails) that were filled with parents and their children on toboggans which it seemed like were rented from the ski resort.
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