Resort check: DisentisFall-Line is synonymous with meticulous organisation. No, really! If you run a magazine about mountains from a place with no mountains, dealing in a substance that melts every year, you’ve got to be on the ball.
Of course, sometimes balls get dropped, as we find on the wrong side of a mountain pass, hungry and lost on the way to Disentis, Switzerland.
Anyone in event marketing should take a leaf out of the Christmas book; choose a date and stick to it, year after year. Need some proof? Just look at poor old Easter, which gets kind of lost, thanks to the massive variety of dates it might randomly land on. This year we discovered it had randomly landed on the Fall-Line team, as we packed the borrowed Mitsubishi and set off on the annual gear test. (Which, incidentally, is always from the 10th of April. Oh yes, it’s an institution.)
Good Friday 05.00
Farce number one – there has been some misunderestimation in the space-in-vehicle to amount-of-luggage ratio. Packed to the ceiling, and with the whole of Winter Top End and Spring Mid still to get in, we empty the truck out all over the Fall-Line car park, discard the cardboard boxes and pack the clothing back in, a great squashy mass of legs and arms in fluoro colours and disembodied gloves trying to make their getaway like the Addams Family’s Thing. Eventually, with some of the softer down items stuffed in the back seat as travel blankets, we hit the road. After a bit of jostling to make room to breathe, it starts to look like it might be alright, until we get to Gatwick, where we’re due to pick up a huge Scotsman – freeskier Ben Thorburn – and his even huger skis. Considerably more reshuffling and amazingly the tardis truck’s doors can still be closed, although with a muffled latch click, and a squeak from the human bodies behind.
Good Friday 11.25
As usual with ferries it’s hard to tell if it’s time to catch up on the missed sleep of an early start, or whether we’re far enough away from the office to have a little celebratory demi. The team choose one or other, or both. We’ve already reluctantly had to agree that there’s no point stopping for supplies in the hypermarchets – we’d struggle to get a wafer-thin mint in here. Remember this, it will become an increasingly important fact.
And so we get onto the autoroute, plug into the satnav and tune out. It’s not until almost 1000km have passed that we realise someone really ought to have looked at a map. A real map – not a small electronic one connected to an encouraging voice but no common sense. Even worse – some of us have been here before! (Yes, me. I am ashamed.) Where? In Andermatt, town of the famous Pass, at midnight, under a vast, starry Alpine sky, in front of a roadblock of snow. “Drive onto ferry,” says the satnav, optimistically. She means the train through the mountain, which is very much not a 24-hour facility. We race around the town, finding that all 1312 inhabitants are out on the town, dressed up scantily like the population of a Northern nightclub.
Saturday 08.30
The car train is more exciting than we’d expected, being pretty much the same width as the truck, so we have to do a kind of Spiderman move along the side to get to the carriage. When we set off, the train winds through tunnels, and then alongside the pistes and mountain restaurants of first Nätschen and then Oberalp, before dropping down to pass the base station of Sedrun, and at last Disentis. It’s the first time I’ve travelled through the ski area to get to the village, and it’s a great preview of the days to come.
Saturday 13.20
A speedy whirlwind of finding our accommodation, unpacking, tracking down liftpasses etc, and we’re out on the hill. There’s a lot of clothing to be tested but, joy of joy, that means we have to do a lot of skiing! I’m going to gloss over that part, for fear of arousing too much jealousy among ski geeks everywhere. With pockets stuffed full of spreadsheets of waterproofing info and the like, we throw ourselves into the task, and down piste after piste. We are only a few weeks off the end of the season, but the snow cover is great, and we charge about like the clappers. It’s a great place for piste chargers, and we cover the 1600m from top to bottom a few times. The last few hundred metres are a bit syrupy, but pretty impressive for mid April.
Disentis has 60km (38 miles) of piste, best suited to intermediates. The 300 vertical metres covered by the draglift up to 2833m on Pez Ault is a long haul. Luckily the landscape is worth gazing at, and we mere office mortals get a bit of extra entertainment as we spot Ben Thorburn, our fearless Scot, undertaking a long traverse across the opposite hillside, before charging down to the piste, making short shrift of the cliffs on the way. The pistes are ours, and we never have to queue – Disentis puts a firm tick in the ‘hidden gem’ box. Over the following week we get to have a good look around. There are some great itineraries for those who fancy a hike first, but for the lazier skier there’s the Val Gronda. Push off from the top of the Pez Ault drag, and you can’t go wrong – all routes lead you out, eventually, to the Val Acletta, and back to town.
Easter Sunday 12.40
Things are getting worrying, from a food point of view. No one really took into account that all the shops and takeaway joints would be closed for Easter. We know from experience that a team of hardworking gear testers can eat and drink a restaurant dry. The local ‘bizochel’ dumplings go down like hundreds and thousands. So we usually head for a supermarket and stock up with industrial quantities of ham and cheese, pasta and cereal and beer. But we’re thwarted by a religious holiday, and food sources are scarce. Luckily the mountain restaurant buffets are open, so we fill up like camels at an oasis.
Easter Sunday 14.15
The Sedrun Andermatt area just a little way back up the valley has another 140 km (87 miles) of piste. The Sedrun bit is pretty mellow – a huge open mountainside with parks and two fun skiercross courses alongside that are perfect for keeping groups of mixed ability entertained. We came over to meet up with one of our favourite photographers, Oskar Enander, and his band of merry pros. This is part of a marketing effort that is in place, with the aim of removing the ‘hidden’ part while exposing the ‘gem’. It’s no co-incidence that the tourist board troubleshooter who brought freeride fame to Engelberg is now working his magic in Disentis. The towns have similarities – both have relatively few lifts and pistes, compared to the amount of easily accessed backcountry, and both are already well-loved by Swiss mountaineers, guides, freeriders, and shit-hot photographers. Both also have ancient Benedictine monasteries – the one in Disentis is the oldest in the Alps, with its earliest foundations dating back to 700AD. The main sense that you get of these aged beginnings, in both places, is that the villages feel very bedded in – serious and settled and calm. There’s none of the wild overexcitement of the Alps’ brand new resorts, where the town exists purely for the service of the visitors. Both types of place have their merits, of course, but we can see Disentis appealing to real skiers.
Easter Sunday 16.15
That’s not to say that you can’t let your hair down in town. There doesn’t seem any need to look further than the Nangijula. It’s on the main street down from the lifts, and has persuasive happy hours and fine snacks. Or dinner, as it’s called if you happen to be in Disentis at Easter. The terrace out that back is great, and in full sunshine for hours after the lifts close, and as if the deal needed sealing they also have free wifi (damn, no excuse not to keep working), and live music (at last! Clearly too loud to keep working…). The staff are all friendly Scandinavians, with tans that suggest they are here for serious mountain-loving reasons. It’s the kind of bar that pulls a resort together, and as if it couldn’t get better, there’s accommodation too – beds are 30CHF (£17) each, less if you don’t want bedding, and you can have breakfast or cook for yourself, if the supermarkets ever open…
Easter Monday 08.10
One shop opens – a bakery with four different sorts of pastry. We buy a lot, and fill our test-clothing’s pockets. The clouds seem to be closing in a bit, covering the bright sun that’s beamed down on us until now. It’s no bad thing – the team get out some of the warmer clothing, and the lower pistes stay a bit firmer for longer.
Easter Monday 12.50
After another morning on the hill it’s photoshoot time. An advance party has scouted out somewhere nice and snowy for James, staff photographer, to get set up, and the rest of the testers traipse out dutifully. Be careful what you wish for, says Disentis, and after we’ve been there 20 minutes the skies open, and huge flakes of cold, wet snow start pouring out. It’s good for the shoot, but the models get quite reluctant to change trousers. Some morale-boosting ice-creams are sent for, and buried in the snow as incentives.
Easter Monday 17.20
The women’s stuff is all shot, and as we wait around for the men to finish I amuse myself stamping the shape of a 100ft naked woman into the snow on the road. It is an Art Attack, and it keeps me warm. The ice-creams are eaten, James is taking pictures from under an umbrella strapped to his back, and finally the shoot is done. Just as we get in the car, a couple of local dog-walking old boys arrive for a chat, and as they leave they give the naked woman a nod – it turns out they’d come over the hill and seen the woman beckoning from below.
Tuesday 08.30
The shops are open! Ben Thorburn, in the front seat, eats almost a whole box of chocco pops in the car park, out of sheer joy. We have food, we have snow, we have several more days of skiing and making notes about zips and hoods and breathability – the gear test is saved.
RESORT STATS
Disentis
Pistes 60km
Lifts 8
Terrain Parks 1
Highest altitude 2833m
Village altitude 1150m
Beginner pistes 20%
Intermediate pistes 60%
Advanced pistes 20%
Sedrun/Andermatt
Pistes 130km
Lifts 25
Terrain Parks 2
Highest altitude 2965m
Village altitude 1445m
Beginner pistes 23%
Intermediate pistes 50%
Advanced pistes 27%
Tourist Office
Phone number +41 (0)81 920 40 30
Website http://winter.disentis-sedrun.info
BEST PISTES AND ITINERARIES
Best blue to learn anything on…
The piste to skier’s right of Gendusas, passing under the lift and ending at Caischavedra, is nice and mellow. Total beginners can make use of the Skiwiese SAX beginner area on the valley floor
Best red for a warm-up…
Sedrun’s pistes are best for beginners and intermediates. Razz from the very top down to Milez, or even right to the base at Dieni if you want the deep burn! It looks like three parallel pistes on the map, but it’s actually one super wide mountainside, with the Tegia-Gronda park on skier’s right to test yourself in
Best black to scare the hell out of yourself…
In Disentis, take the black from Lai Alv to Gendusas – that’s pretty steep
Best trees when the weather closes in…
In Disentis the run from Caishavedra back down to the village is a steep black, which is surrounded by trees – good for a bit of tree skiing. In Sedrun the piste from Milez down to the bottom is the closest you’ll get to trees
Best off-piste in the area…
Head up to Pez Ault, from which you can drop down into Val Gronda. All good fun, and all routes end up in Val Acletta which brings you back to the base station – no-fail fun! For a real project hike from Pez Ault up the Oberalpstock – a 500m climb. In return you get 2300m vert down to Maderanertal. It’s a mission on public transport to get back though, so leave lots of time!
Don’t miss…
The view from Pez Ault: you can see the whole of the Graubünden Alps laid before you, as far as Chur, Flims and Laax, the lot…
GETTING THERE
Flying
Zurich is the closest, and it’s well served from the UK by:
...and more.
It’s about two hours from Zurich by road but look at a map – there are two options and one is over Andermatt – take the Chur route, or book the car train times in advance.
If you’re hiring a car, Milan is an option too – you can sneak into Disentis over the Lukmanier pass, which takes 2.5 hours.
We flew back via Friedrichshafen, which was much easier than we expected, and the train journey included a boat journey across the Bodensee in the April sunshine!
Transfers
Graubünden know how to make it easy for you, and run bespoke transfers around the mountains and down to Friedrichshafen or Zurich, right from your hotel. Disentis to Friedrichshafen works out at 59€ one-way, or 109€ return.
The train is even cheaper. It’s three hours to Zurich (from 114CHF, or £65), or 4.5-5.5 hours to Friedrichshafen (somehow the team who flew back got tickets for 65CHF each – that’s just £38!) – make sure your ticket goes via Romanshorn if you want to get the boat!
STAYING THERE
On a budget
Nangijula Bar & Café is the place to be, and it has free wifi, live music and good happy hour deals. No website though – call +41 (0)81 936 44 60
Mid price
The Hotel Montana is a good three star hotel, which is popular as a freeride basecamp, so you’ll be bedding down with a lot of good skiers, mountaineers and guides.
Expensive
Hotel Cucagna lords it over the town – it’s above the supermarket, and has a big balcony that does a bit of après.
EATING & DRINKING
A couple of options, for example:
Pizzeria Surselva do a fine oven-baked pizza. You can take them away too, and they’re better than the ones from the actual takeaway pizza joint
Hotel Alpsu is the place for local dishes – you’ll find a lot of dumplings in these parts!
Hotel Rhätia is the place for high-class Swiss cuisine on a pizza budget! Meals are around 30CHF (£17)
The above was an extract from Fall-Line Skiing Magazine, issue 85. Words by Hannah Engelkamp, photography by James Bryant
Related stories:
Resort Check: Summer shredding
Resort Check: Kaunertal, Austria
Resort Check: Les Portes du Soleil
Posted by Online Editor - Sun, 02/05/2010 - 5:40pm
Fall-Line is synonymous with meticulous organisation. No, really! If you run a magazine about mountains from a place with no mountains, dealing in a substance that melts every year, you’ve got to be on the ball.
Of course, sometimes balls get dropped, as we find on the wrong side of a mountain pass, hungry and lost on the way to Disentis, Switzerland.
Anyone in event marketing should take a leaf out of the Christmas book; choose a date and stick to it, year after year. Need some proof? Just look at poor old Easter, which gets kind of lost, thanks to the massive variety of dates it might randomly land on. This year we discovered it had randomly landed on the Fall-Line team, as we packed the borrowed Mitsubishi and set off on the annual gear test. (Which, incidentally, is always from the 10th of April. Oh yes, it’s an institution.)
Good Friday 05.00
Farce number one – there has been some misunderestimation in the space-in-vehicle to amount-of-luggage ratio. Packed to the ceiling, and with the whole of Winter Top End and Spring Mid still to get in, we empty the truck out all over the Fall-Line car park, discard the cardboard boxes and pack the clothing back in, a great squashy mass of legs and arms in fluoro colours and disembodied gloves trying to make their getaway like the Addams Family’s Thing. Eventually, with some of the softer down items stuffed in the back seat as travel blankets, we hit the road. After a bit of jostling to make room to breathe, it starts to look like it might be alright, until we get to Gatwick, where we’re due to pick up a huge Scotsman – freeskier Ben Thorburn – and his even huger skis. Considerably more reshuffling and amazingly the tardis truck’s doors can still be closed, although with a muffled latch click, and a squeak from the human bodies behind.
Good Friday 11.25
As usual with ferries it’s hard to tell if it’s time to catch up on the missed sleep of an early start, or whether we’re far enough away from the office to have a little celebratory demi. The team choose one or other, or both. We’ve already reluctantly had to agree that there’s no point stopping for supplies in the hypermarchets – we’d struggle to get a wafer-thin mint in here. Remember this, it will become an increasingly important fact.
And so we get onto the autoroute, plug into the satnav and tune out. It’s not until almost 1000km have passed that we realise someone really ought to have looked at a map. A real map – not a small electronic one connected to an encouraging voice but no common sense. Even worse – some of us have been here before! (Yes, me. I am ashamed.) Where? In Andermatt, town of the famous Pass, at midnight, under a vast, starry Alpine sky, in front of a roadblock of snow. “Drive onto ferry,” says the satnav, optimistically. She means the train through the mountain, which is very much not a 24-hour facility. We race around the town, finding that all 1312 inhabitants are out on the town, dressed up scantily like the population of a Northern nightclub.
Saturday 08.30
The car train is more exciting than we’d expected, being pretty much the same width as the truck, so we have to do a kind of Spiderman move along the side to get to the carriage. When we set off, the train winds through tunnels, and then alongside the pistes and mountain restaurants of first Nätschen and then Oberalp, before dropping down to pass the base station of Sedrun, and at last Disentis. It’s the first time I’ve travelled through the ski area to get to the village, and it’s a great preview of the days to come.
Saturday 13.20
A speedy whirlwind of finding our accommodation, unpacking, tracking down liftpasses etc, and we’re out on the hill. There’s a lot of clothing to be tested but, joy of joy, that means we have to do a lot of skiing! I’m going to gloss over that part, for fear of arousing too much jealousy among ski geeks everywhere. With pockets stuffed full of spreadsheets of waterproofing info and the like, we throw ourselves into the task, and down piste after piste. We are only a few weeks off the end of the season, but the snow cover is great, and we charge about like the clappers. It’s a great place for piste chargers, and we cover the 1600m from top to bottom a few times. The last few hundred metres are a bit syrupy, but pretty impressive for mid April.
Disentis has 60km (38 miles) of piste, best suited to intermediates. The 300 vertical metres covered by the draglift up to 2833m on Pez Ault is a long haul. Luckily the landscape is worth gazing at, and we mere office mortals get a bit of extra entertainment as we spot Ben Thorburn, our fearless Scot, undertaking a long traverse across the opposite hillside, before charging down to the piste, making short shrift of the cliffs on the way. The pistes are ours, and we never have to queue – Disentis puts a firm tick in the ‘hidden gem’ box. Over the following week we get to have a good look around. There are some great itineraries for those who fancy a hike first, but for the lazier skier there’s the Val Gronda. Push off from the top of the Pez Ault drag, and you can’t go wrong – all routes lead you out, eventually, to the Val Acletta, and back to town.
Easter Sunday 12.40
Things are getting worrying, from a food point of view. No one really took into account that all the shops and takeaway joints would be closed for Easter. We know from experience that a team of hardworking gear testers can eat and drink a restaurant dry. The local ‘bizochel’ dumplings go down like hundreds and thousands. So we usually head for a supermarket and stock up with industrial quantities of ham and cheese, pasta and cereal and beer. But we’re thwarted by a religious holiday, and food sources are scarce. Luckily the mountain restaurant buffets are open, so we fill up like camels at an oasis.
Easter Sunday 14.15
The Sedrun Andermatt area just a little way back up the valley has another 140 km (87 miles) of piste. The Sedrun bit is pretty mellow – a huge open mountainside with parks and two fun skiercross courses alongside that are perfect for keeping groups of mixed ability entertained. We came over to meet up with one of our favourite photographers, Oskar Enander, and his band of merry pros. This is part of a marketing effort that is in place, with the aim of removing the ‘hidden’ part while exposing the ‘gem’. It’s no co-incidence that the tourist board troubleshooter who brought freeride fame to Engelberg is now working his magic in Disentis. The towns have similarities – both have relatively few lifts and pistes, compared to the amount of easily accessed backcountry, and both are already well-loved by Swiss mountaineers, guides, freeriders, and shit-hot photographers. Both also have ancient Benedictine monasteries – the one in Disentis is the oldest in the Alps, with its earliest foundations dating back to 700AD. The main sense that you get of these aged beginnings, in both places, is that the villages feel very bedded in – serious and settled and calm. There’s none of the wild overexcitement of the Alps’ brand new resorts, where the town exists purely for the service of the visitors. Both types of place have their merits, of course, but we can see Disentis appealing to real skiers.
Easter Sunday 16.15
That’s not to say that you can’t let your hair down in town. There doesn’t seem any need to look further than the Nangijula. It’s on the main street down from the lifts, and has persuasive happy hours and fine snacks. Or dinner, as it’s called if you happen to be in Disentis at Easter. The terrace out that back is great, and in full sunshine for hours after the lifts close, and as if the deal needed sealing they also have free wifi (damn, no excuse not to keep working), and live music (at last! Clearly too loud to keep working…). The staff are all friendly Scandinavians, with tans that suggest they are here for serious mountain-loving reasons. It’s the kind of bar that pulls a resort together, and as if it couldn’t get better, there’s accommodation too – beds are 30CHF (£17) each, less if you don’t want bedding, and you can have breakfast or cook for yourself, if the supermarkets ever open…
Easter Monday 08.10
One shop opens – a bakery with four different sorts of pastry. We buy a lot, and fill our test-clothing’s pockets. The clouds seem to be closing in a bit, covering the bright sun that’s beamed down on us until now. It’s no bad thing – the team get out some of the warmer clothing, and the lower pistes stay a bit firmer for longer.
Easter Monday 12.50
After another morning on the hill it’s photoshoot time. An advance party has scouted out somewhere nice and snowy for James, staff photographer, to get set up, and the rest of the testers traipse out dutifully. Be careful what you wish for, says Disentis, and after we’ve been there 20 minutes the skies open, and huge flakes of cold, wet snow start pouring out. It’s good for the shoot, but the models get quite reluctant to change trousers. Some morale-boosting ice-creams are sent for, and buried in the snow as incentives.
Easter Monday 17.20
The women’s stuff is all shot, and as we wait around for the men to finish I amuse myself stamping the shape of a 100ft naked woman into the snow on the road. It is an Art Attack, and it keeps me warm. The ice-creams are eaten, James is taking pictures from under an umbrella strapped to his back, and finally the shoot is done. Just as we get in the car, a couple of local dog-walking old boys arrive for a chat, and as they leave they give the naked woman a nod – it turns out they’d come over the hill and seen the woman beckoning from below.
Tuesday 08.30
The shops are open! Ben Thorburn, in the front seat, eats almost a whole box of chocco pops in the car park, out of sheer joy. We have food, we have snow, we have several more days of skiing and making notes about zips and hoods and breathability – the gear test is saved.
RESORT STATS
Disentis
Pistes 60km
Lifts 8
Terrain Parks 1
Highest altitude 2833m
Village altitude 1150m
Beginner pistes 20%
Intermediate pistes 60%
Advanced pistes 20%
Sedrun/Andermatt
Pistes 130km
Lifts 25
Terrain Parks 2
Highest altitude 2965m
Village altitude 1445m
Beginner pistes 23%
Intermediate pistes 50%
Advanced pistes 27%
Tourist Office
Phone number +41 (0)81 920 40 30
Website http://winter.disentis-sedrun.info
BEST PISTES AND ITINERARIES
Best blue to learn anything on…
The piste to skier’s right of Gendusas, passing under the lift and ending at Caischavedra, is nice and mellow. Total beginners can make use of the Skiwiese SAX beginner area on the valley floor
Best red for a warm-up…
Sedrun’s pistes are best for beginners and intermediates. Razz from the very top down to Milez, or even right to the base at Dieni if you want the deep burn! It looks like three parallel pistes on the map, but it’s actually one super wide mountainside, with the Tegia-Gronda park on skier’s right to test yourself in
Best black to scare the hell out of yourself…
In Disentis, take the black from Lai Alv to Gendusas – that’s pretty steep
Best trees when the weather closes in…
In Disentis the run from Caishavedra back down to the village is a steep black, which is surrounded by trees – good for a bit of tree skiing. In Sedrun the piste from Milez down to the bottom is the closest you’ll get to trees
Best off-piste in the area…
Head up to Pez Ault, from which you can drop down into Val Gronda. All good fun, and all routes end up in Val Acletta which brings you back to the base station – no-fail fun! For a real project hike from Pez Ault up the Oberalpstock – a 500m climb. In return you get 2300m vert down to Maderanertal. It’s a mission on public transport to get back though, so leave lots of time!
Don’t miss…
The view from Pez Ault: you can see the whole of the Graubünden Alps laid before you, as far as Chur, Flims and Laax, the lot…
GETTING THERE
Flying
Zurich is the closest, and it’s well served from the UK by:
...and more.
It’s about two hours from Zurich by road but look at a map – there are two options and one is over Andermatt – take the Chur route, or book the car train times in advance.
If you’re hiring a car, Milan is an option too – you can sneak into Disentis over the Lukmanier pass, which takes 2.5 hours.
We flew back via Friedrichshafen, which was much easier than we expected, and the train journey included a boat journey across the Bodensee in the April sunshine!
Transfers
Graubünden know how to make it easy for you, and run bespoke transfers around the mountains and down to Friedrichshafen or Zurich, right from your hotel. Disentis to Friedrichshafen works out at 59€ one-way, or 109€ return.
The train is even cheaper. It’s three hours to Zurich (from 114CHF, or £65), or 4.5-5.5 hours to Friedrichshafen (somehow the team who flew back got tickets for 65CHF each – that’s just £38!) – make sure your ticket goes via Romanshorn if you want to get the boat!
STAYING THERE
On a budget
Nangijula Bar & Café is the place to be, and it has free wifi, live music and good happy hour deals. No website though – call +41 (0)81 936 44 60
Mid price
The Hotel Montana is a good three star hotel, which is popular as a freeride basecamp, so you’ll be bedding down with a lot of good skiers, mountaineers and guides.
Expensive
Hotel Cucagna lords it over the town – it’s above the supermarket, and has a big balcony that does a bit of après.
EATING & DRINKING
A couple of options, for example:
Pizzeria Surselva do a fine oven-baked pizza. You can take them away too, and they’re better than the ones from the actual takeaway pizza joint
Hotel Alpsu is the place for local dishes – you’ll find a lot of dumplings in these parts!
Hotel Rhätia is the place for high-class Swiss cuisine on a pizza budget! Meals are around 30CHF (£17)
The above was an extract from Fall-Line Skiing Magazine, issue 85. Words by Hannah Engelkamp, photography by James Bryant
Related stories:
Resort Check: Summer shredding
Resort Check: Kaunertal, Austria
Resort Check: Les Portes du Soleil