To the Flumserberg!

It has been snowing on the bergs and berglis of Der Schweiz for about two weeks, and many of the ski hills near Zurich opened last weekend. Swiss Miss and I were busy last weekend with our birthday bonanza, but we decided to hit the slopes today and squeeze in one day of skiing before going to Toronto for Christmas. Our destination of choice: Flumserberg. Above the quaint village of Flums, 1.0 hours from Zurich by car or a very convenient 1h20 minutes by direct train from Zurich HB. The Swiss seem to think that train is the best approach, as the following infotainments advise:

1. courtesy of www.flumserberg.ch:

Sit, relax and enjoy

There is no point in dealing with traffic jam whilst the S-train commutes between Zürich and Unterterzen! The journey is easy, smooth and enjoyable. You'll reach Flumserberg from Unterterzen (Quarten) by cable car, which indulges you with a breathtaking panorama of the lake of Walenstadt down until the lake of Zurich.

2. courtesy of Swiss Rail's Snow'n'Rail service:

Next stop Flumserberg

It only takes 15 minutes to reach Flumserberg from Unterterzen on the modern 8-person cable car.

And after jumping off the train, you can test the latest skis and boards at the new Intersport Walensee at Unterterzen station!The station also has a new information point for those wanting to know more about the many recreational activities on offer in Heidiland. Resort Walensee’s trendy Tenna-Bar is a great place to relax and meet friends both old and new. But perhaps its greatest asset is the fact that it’s on the S2 suburban railway line to Zurich main station! So you can make your après-ski last all the way home, without even having to change trains!

Yes that's right, careful reader. The best thing about Flumserberg is that you don't have to bother changing trains during your apres-ski train drinking! Well I can tell you, this certainly sold us, but at the last minute, Swiss Miss and I received a phone call from our trusty friends Max and Alesha, and drove with them instead!
Flumserberg itself was pretty nice, we think. We have been assured that it is very beautiful, and that the views are stunning. It was snowing lightly for most of the day but the real issue was that we were in clouds almost the entire time. At one point it was so foggy that we got lost while on an intermediate run! They put big fluorescent posts up on both sides of the runs but on our last run we ended up on a different descent than we had taken before, and we couldn't see any posts or that many other tracks for that matter! There was only one other skier on the hill with us; the hill had been pretty empty all day.

It all turned out fine of course, as you can guess since I am here for your blogging pleasure a mere 4 hours later! For the record though, most of those 4 hours were taken up by driving home, making and eating dinner, and doing some laundry.

We snapped some pictures which give you an idea of how tough the visibility was. The snow conditions were also quite variable in spots, sometimes icy, sometimes soft, sometimes rocky, sometimes two feet lower than you thought! Swiss Miss, who didn't spend her childhood on skis like Swiss Mister did, fought her way through in admirable fashion, skiing intermediate runs all day and doing a fantastic job of it. She only fell once (whereas I fell twice, and got stuck on a small cliff inadvertently!) and she mostly had fun, and her hair got quite frosty by the end too!