Snow report St. Moritz / Engadine, 12/07/2020

Snow condition

After you could have ridden the flow trails on Corviglia by MTB without any problems on Thursday, it started snowing at midday on Friday and didn't actually stop until this morning. There is a good 160cm of snow on Corviglia at marguns, and an estimated one meter in the valley. Towards the south (Corvatsch/Maloja) probably even more. The SLF writes that the 3-day precipitation record was broken at some measuring stations in the Upper Engadine, so you can ski without any problems, but I would still avoid stony, rocky terrain.

Snow quality

After a short spell of rain in the night from Sat to Sun up to about 2000m, it got colder and this morning it was -9 degrees in Samedan (1800m). The sinking depths weren't too great, but it was a good thigh-deep and there were face shots! The snow is loose, cold and powdery up to around 2400m, with increasing wind influence above that. Pretty cool to ride anyway!

If you follow the bulletins from the SLF over the last few days, you get a very tense picture: in some regions from 0 to LWS 4, then today a tricky 3 in the Upper Engadine. However, it felt safer than expected below 2400m (we didn't actually get out higher today) - but that doesn't mean it was relaxed -. Even the helicopter blasts in the ski area that we were able to observe in places didn't produce the expected (by us) results. However, I think that the danger increases significantly with the increasing altitude and the resulting increase in wind input, and it will also be interesting to see what it looks like on the shaded side, where there was something like a base...

Overall impression

It's just great to plow through the cold powder again after an extremely long, hard summer!!!