We came back to an area we really liked last year thinking the area needed more trail exploring. The Engadine is in the southeastern corner of Switzerland, right along the Italian border. Most of the western world knows several famous places in the Engadine, notably Davos and St Moritz, but we now know it for it’s countless hiking trails.
The valleys are similar elevations to Durango but the trails lead straight out of a string of villages (some as large as St. Moritz) all interconnected by rail, road and bus. The villages with ski-able terrain above have gondolas, cable cars, funiculars or chair lifts leading up and down the mountains. Hiking trails network around, down and thru the various mountains above the villages and provide excellent hiking and scenic opportunities.
One benefit of the Engadine valley is that all the hotels provide a day pass for all the various modes of transport in the region. So, with your hotel room you can start and stop anywhere in the region, and utilize any train, gondola, bus or chair lift to take you up, down or across the mountains. The guilt is gone now using a gondola to take us 5,000′ up so that we can hike six or seven miles across and over the mountain, and if we’re tuckered (which hasn’t happened so far) we could exit the trail at a lift station, bus stop or train station to find our way back to the hotel. We’ve now spent over nine hiking days in this region and could easily find new places to hike next time. The only analogy I could put forth would be to imagine free transport along all the valleys sourounding the San Juan Mountains with the added (hopefully never) aspect of gondolas and lifts up to those remote trailheads.
Almost every day on our all-day hikes we talk about how we wish we could share some of these exceptional experiences, which by the way would be more easily accessed than hiking with us in the San Juan’s. Colorado’s mountains are fantastic but this is really a unique experience seeing how this small country has intertwined exceptional recreation with a denser population, not to mention incredible natural resources.
Besides Colorado doesn’t have glaciers like Switzerland.
It’s not to late to join us, we’ll be here two more weeks.
