2019 - 2020 Far West Skier's Guide - 63

Sometimes, we skinned or hiked for 30-40 minutes to reach virgin slopes.

meal and return slowly to Davos in a horsedrawn sleigh. Like the sparsely populated
Schatzalp, Teufi is Davos at its bucolic best.
We were done for the day, but Sämi was
far from done with us. His home is close to
the Rinerhorn, and he wanted to show us one
of his favorite runs on his home mountain.
The following day, we headed up the Rinerhorn to ski on yet another mountain that was
as quiet as Wall Street on a Sunday morning.
This is another rather small lift system
set onto a big mountain. The facilities consist
of a gondola to the middle station and a handful of T-bars. There are many ski resorts in the
world where one has to go off-piste to get a
semblance of solitude. The Rinerhorn is still
another section of Davos where this elusive
quality is attainable right on the main pistes.
We cruised a morning warm-up run in utter
peace and quiet and followed that with a 15-

minute walk to access another back valley run
- called Bäbi.
Once again, Robert and I were amazed at
the amount of open terrain with seemingly
endless untouched snow. We stayed on northeasterly aspects of the slopes, enjoying the
morning sun. Ultimately, we landed on an icy
track in the Sertigtal that finally spit us out
onto a cross-country track, and we followed
that back to the main road, ending up very
close to our guide's home.
We loaded the skis into Sämi's car and
drove back to the Jakobshorn. This time, we
followed a ski route for a while out past the
Jatz Quattro lift and skinned up and further
back into the valley for about 45 minutes.
Now we were ready to drop back down a different and far less skied route to Teufi, one
that Sämi called Rossboden. The conventional
Teufi route is a great run, but to enjoy powder

Far West Skier's Guide 2O19 - 2O2O

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track as the mountain's main attraction. Then,
in 2009, two of the ski lifts were put back into
service, but the ski area remained outside the
lift pass that encompassed the rest of the resort, and the lift that had previously connected
Schatzalp with the Parsenn region remained
closed. The little ski resort was re-inaugurated
as a "slow skiing area" particularly tailored for
families with small children and elderly skiers
who want to avoid the dangers of crowded
and over-trafficked pistes.
As a result of its isolation from the ski
area at large, very few of the patrons of the
bustling resort of Davos venture up into the
separate pistes of Schatzalp. For that very reason, Sämi figured this to be a perfect spot to
find some untracked powder. As Sämi had expected, long ridges and ravines of pristine
powder lay waiting. The mountain looked
a bit like a ghost town with a lovely old mountain hut devoid of guests at the top and pistes
as empty as a bar in Damascus on a Monday
morning.
I would not say that Robert, Sämi, and I
really respected the Schätzalp/Strela slow-skiing policy, but we were able to feel the ambiance of relaxation that the policy is intended
to invoke. For here was no stressful, crowded
anthill of skiers crisscrossing a narrow piste
trying to avoid collisions and no race with
hundreds of helmet-clad freeride freaks for
first tracks. We were all alone laying three pristine lines in the virgin snow back down toward town. It was as if we had been morphed
back to the 1930s, when skiing was a new
sport and a ski hill was still a place to get
away from the crowds.
Following a quick lunch, we now headed
across to the Jakobshorn, the largest of the ski
areas on the west-facing side of the valley and
a particularly popular location with snowboarders. It is home to the large Jatz terrain
park, and one of Europe's biggest super-pipes.
The famously long runs of the Parsenn naturally have their share of flat, narrow trails, an
anathema to snowboarders, while the terrain
on the Jakobshorn have no such features.
Snowboarders and skiers alike, if they
enjoy powder, will love the unprepared ski
route down the back of the mountain to Teufi.
It begins with a very steep entry that evolves
into undulating terrain, mostly above the tree
line.
This is a perfect end-of-the-day excursion, as the last powder turn brings you to the
rustic Restaurant Teufi, where one can let the
day's ski experiences sink in over a cozy awayfrom-it-all après-ski. One can get a bus back
from there, or alternatively one could quite
easily let the after-ski drift into an evening

2019 - 2020 Far West Skier's Guide

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