Views from above St. Moritz

St. Moritz lies on the southern slopes of the Albula Alps, a mountain range in eastern Switzerland, overlooking the flat and wide glaciated valley of Engadine and Lake St. Moritz.

Because we were visiting just after the peak tourist season, the hotel gave us free unlimited passes for use on the cable cars and funicular trains that were still running, basically all the routes which travel up to the most popular viewpoints.

We traveled up to two other peaks beside Muottas Muragl (see last post): Piz Nair which is directly atop the center of St Mortiz Dorf, and Signal which is situated above St. Moritz Bad.

To reach Piz Nair, a funicular departs from the town center to Corviglia, a ski area at 2,486 m (8,156 ft). Then, we took a cable car to the upper station that is 30 metres (100 ft) below the summit.

Corviglia has a restaurant and a flat area for people to lounge around under the sun, and for young kids to ride their bikes in a small circuit. It is the center of the largest ski area in the Engadine valley.

This mountain hosted the alpine skiing events for the 1948 Winter Olympics. It also hosted the World Championships in 1934, 1974, 2003, and 2017.

From Corviglia, we transferred to a cable car (gondola) to continue our ascent.

There are 24 ski lifts, 36 slopes and 14 mountain restaurants.

In the summer, the same installations support hiking and mountain biking.

As we gained altitude, the conifers thinned out. The biome changed to alpine pasture, and soon the elevation was too high for most vegetation except a thin layer of lichens on rock surfaces.

At the summit stood a statue of an ibex, a large mountain goat with curved horns. Needless to say, the panoramic view from here at 10,026 ft (3,056 m) was fantastic.

Surrounding us were many higher peaks, one with a mini glacier.

We saw many trails radiating from Piz Nair. Several small groups of cyclists were riding with us in the cable cars with their dirt bikes, fully equipped for a fast and furious way downhill.

Signal at 2130 m is another destination that we visited. The cable car station was only 5 minute walk from our hotel in St Moritz Bad.

On the short ride up to Signal, we got to see St. Moritz hugging the lake, from a different direction (west to east).

The trip offered a typical view of off-season ski slopes – almost mundane.

We also saw the funicular that took us up to Corviglia. It did not seem so dramatic when we were on it.

We will end this post with a photo of windsurfing and kite-surfing on Lake Champfer and a corner of the neighboring town of Silvaplana (reaching the limit of our point-and-shoot zoom camera).

To see more above St. Moritz, go to our post on Muottas Muragl, click here.

Muottas Muragl looking over St. Moritz

Muottas Muragl is a location on the southern slopes of Blais da Muottas (2,568 m) and offers at 8,051 feet (2,454 m) the most beautiful vantage point above the lakes of Upper Engadine valley. 

Muottas Muragl is situated between the villages of Samedan and Pontresina, accessible by a funicular railway built in 1907 that takes a 700-meter climb from Punt Muragl.  At the top, there is a hotel and a panoramic restaurant. 

This photo of the hotel and restaurant (with a straight-up funicular) at Muottas Muragl is taken from another mountainous location further down the valley.

We took a bus from our hotel, passed the town center at St. Moritz Dorf then the main train station, heading in the direction of Samedan to the funicular base station (1739 m).

The track is very steep, as much as 54% gradient. There are two counterbalanced carriages that ride on the same track. When the carriages come close together, the track splits into two as a “passing loop” for both carriages to pass one another.

We did not time the ride but it felt like 10-12 minutes. The first half of the line ran entirely through a forest, the second part of the line went on open mountain pasture.

The main attraction of Muottas Muragl is the view of the Upper Engadin valley flanked by views of Piz Palü, and Piz Bernina with Biancograt.  Picturesque defined.

Renovated in 2010, the Romantik Hotel Muottas Muragl is the first “Plus Energy” Hotel anywhere in the Alps, producing more solar energy on an annual average than the hotel itself requires. The excess energy is stored by a geothermal circuit underground. It is also CO2-neutral.

Apparently, the restaurant is not a fast-food style cafeteria typically found at summit locations. It is a gourmet restaurant which serves dinner accompanied by a spectacular sunset view. The funicular train runs until 11pm.

We did not bother to get anything there as it was quite crowded (not safe).

The location provides a bird’s eye view of the entire St. Moritz (above).

Unlike most of the high mountain locations, it does not provide skiing, although there are numerous Alpine hiking trails, snow shoeing trails and a toboggan-run to the station below.

There is a short loop behind the hotel that takes one to several vantage points in different directions and art. The iron sculpture (above) by Curdin Niggli, presented in 2007 to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of the funicular railway, symbolises the crossing of the two railways in the middle (in Romansh “Cruscheda”).

We spotted a few hang gliders.

We encountered a herd of black Hérens cows happily relaxing behind an inconspicuous fence.  They seemed to be free to roam anywhere on the mountain. We think the fence is to prevent them from wandering into the restaurant and hotel.

Along the loop, we saw “Sine sole sileo” – the world’s most precise sundial. In winter, it can also be used as an almost equally precise moondial.  Its unique construction makes it possible to read the time to an accuracy of an incredible 10 seconds.

«Il Guot» – Romansh for «the drop» – is a unique work of art created by Timo Lindner to mark the centenary of the funicular railway. The drop, which is made of natural stone and mortar and coated in white marble, symbolises water in all its various forms, from rain to ice to snow.

It was a really nice sunny windless day with comfortable temperatures. R & R at high altitude.

Sankt Moritz, Graubünden

St. Moritz is the destination of our long-weekend road trip to the Eastern side of Switzerland. We spent 4 posts describing our journey over five mountain passes to get here, see part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.

For this post, let’s hear a 1989 Swing Out Sister instrumental:

St. Moritz (German: Sankt Moritz, Romansh: San Murezzan, Italian: San Maurizio, French: Saint-Maurice) is an Alpine resort town situated in the canton of (the) Grisons (French), or canton of Graubünden (German).  Graubünden is the largest and easternmost canton of Switzerland and has international borders with Italy, Austria and Liechtenstein.

The town lies in the Engadine valley, at an elevation of about 1,800 metres (5,910 ft) above sea level.  The highest summit in the Eastern Alps is Piz Bernina at 4,048 m (13,283 ft), just about 20 km (10 miles) southeast of St. Moritz.

St. Moritz is first mentioned around 1137–39 as ad sanctum Mauricium.  During Medieval times, visitors came here in the summer to enjoy the curative spring waters.

Most of the population speaks German, with Italian being second most common, and Portuguese being third (6.6%).  The town is split into two halves: the older and ritzier Sankt Moritz Dorf, and Sankt Moritz Bad at the southeast end where most of the spas are located.

St. Moritz has been a resort for winter sport vacations since 1864 when Johannes Badrutt first brought English tourists here in the winter.  In 1856, he bought a small guesthouse in St. Moritz and started to rebuild it, to create the Hotel Engadiner Kulm, which is today known as the Kulm Hotel St. Moritz.

The Badrutt family bought the Hotel Beau Rivage in St. Moritz and altered it to create the Badrutt’s Palace Hotel which we see today (above) in the town center.

The hotel has been a playground of the world’s rich, famous and aristocratic since then.  For the status-conscious, it is still the place to be seen.

The town hosted twice the Winter Olympics in 1928 and 1948. It is probably one of the most glamorous international winter resort.

The town center is filled with luxury fashion stores, lining Via Serlas (above). We walked around and peered into some windows.  As it is the low season, the town center was kind of quiet, except a group of international students from a Swiss boarding school.

Chamonix in France is also a chic Alpine resort but the shops were mostly selling designer sportswear.  St Moritz seems to cater to a seriously affluent group of old-money clientele – see diamonds in Cartier’s window display.

The town enjoys more than 300 days of sunshine.  The sun is the symbol of the town.  It is apparently extremely popular in the summer months as an altitude training base for distance athletes, particularly cyclists, runners, and race walkers.

Lake St Moritz as well as neighboring Lake Silvaplana are also well known as a destination for sailing, rowing, windsurfing, and kite-surfing. The wind pattern in the Engadin valley is predictable and reliable.

Food truck by the lake – “Soul Food Trailer” housed in a Model Airstream 4U.

St. Moritz is the highest town (with a sizable urban area) in Switzerland with a railway station (below).  We passed it on a bus on our way to the funicular station for Muottas Muragl (next post).

Many hotels in this town close during the low season – September-November.  Our hotel was still receiving guests but several of its restaurants were closed.  The hotel was built in 1896 as the Grand Hotel des Bains, and Kempinski took it over in 2002.

The hotel was doing a promotion of Verve Cliquot champagne, hence the orange cable car.  Although the hotel was pretty empty, it was very adequately staffed and they were very helpful and accommodating.

After driving two days non-stop in the mountains, we took full advantage of the spa and sauna which were also quiet and thus relatively safe.

 

Our trips in 2020

Dear Readers, Happy 2021 !

What a nightmarish year we had.  Glad that it is the beginning of a new year.  Although the problems are not going away immediately, it is however symbolic that we are all moving on, to a better tomorrow. And we will …

It is a tradition on this blog to take a look back at some of the places we visited last year. Because of the pandemic, we traveled very little, Morocco in January and the Eastern side of Switzerland in September, plus a day trip to Bern.

Marrakesh, Morocco – Jemaa el-Fna and Kotoubia

Dar Darma, Marrakesh

Merzouga – the edge of Sahara

Essaouira on the Atlantic coast of Morocco

Grimselsee at 1,908 m (6,260 ft), Switzerland

Muottas Muragl at 8,051 feet (2,454 m) above St Moritz

A night in a yurt at Tgalucas, Alp Flix at 6,463 feet (1,970 m)

Staring at Piz Bernina 4,049 m (13,283 ft)

A night on the Pilatus summit at 6,801 feet (2,073 m) to see sunrise before 7 am.

Sunrise from Esel at 6,949 feet (2,118 m), Mount Pilatus

Oberhaupt at 6,906 feet (2,105 m), Mount Pilatus

The Parliament Building, Bundesplatz, Bern

For 2021, I(Chris) bought a new camera by Olympus with 2 lenses – the pictures above (and many others on the blog) were taken using a Lumix LX7 or a Lumix TZ101.  The photo below was snapped by an iPhone XR –  it is not from an advertisement. We will have a separate post about the camera system later.

Testing the new camera around town – Lausanne.

We also upgraded our software from Lightroom 6 to Lightroom Classic.

Hope to make more black & white photos in 2021.