A classic ski tour 🎿 in the hood

Story

We had a superb winter 2021 in Switzerland. Dirk, a friend of mine, knew about a local ski touring in Basel-land. We drove from Basel under a snowfall that was covering the the whole city under a white carpet ☃️. While we were driving, we were already getting excited about what to expect in Wasserfallen.

We took the gondola 🚡 up to Wasserfallen to save some meters of elevation (500m). The first 10 minutes were a bit foggy but soon started to clear up. We skinned our split-boards and went up to the "Berggasthaus Hintere Wasserfallen" and took the single trail on the ridge. It was a completely different experience than running, a truly winter wonderland landscape 🤩.

Once very close to Vogelberg we turned right and did the run down 🏂 towards Chliweidli where we found the house as a reference. It starts with a nice run down crossing a road, afterwards we traversed, where it was important to keep the speed the altitude and find the right spot to cross the fence (the hiking gate) all of this while staying on the right side of the Vogelbergbach.

Once in Chliweidli we changed again the settings and did another ascent direction to Geitenberg. In this area we saw a bunch of other tourers 🎿 who were coming directly from Lauwil. We discovered that this place is not such a hidden gem but the place to be!

A bit before Geitenberg summit we changed our settings to snowboard and we enjoyed a deep snow run towards Lauwil. Here are some tricky points where we needed to find the right spot to pass the fences 🚧.

While going down we had good visibility and even a little window where we could see the sun beams, it was a dream to have conditions like this so close to home.

Further down we rode through cherry trees 🍒, next to a farm, crossed a little path and finally made it to a road.

We ended on that road, next to a bridge and a little parking further down (Lauwil Lüshübel). From here we needed to walk 5 minutes to the centre of Lauwil where we could catch the bus 🚌

We don't always need the big Alps to have a good day of fun. Re-discovering these trails I run with the split-board was definitively an awesome experience 😁

Key figures

• Distance: 7 kilometres

• Elevation: 450 meters

What you need?

• Ski Mountaineering set

• One gondola ride to Wasserfallen (optional*)

• Bus ticket Lauwil - Reigoldswil (optional**)

*To skip the first 500m up
**To skip a traverse to cross back again

Resources

GPX

Baselland ski touring_Lauwil

.gpx

Download GPX • 1.28MB

Strava Adventure