Area: | Feldberg |
Base: | 950m |
Summit: | 1450m |
Skiable vertical: | 500m |
Lifts: | 9 (7 draglifts) |
Total lift vert: | 1300m |
Slope orientation: | South-east and North-east facing |
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Feldberg is apparently the highest peak in the German Schwarzwald, and you get the feeling of being high above the plains from the top. It's not far from Basel or Schaffhausen, so easily reachable as a day trip from Switzerland.
For a zoomable, scrollable map of the area, see this online map using Openstreetmap or Opencyclemap.
It's a bit of a trek by train from Zürich, but by car the access is fast and easy. Parking can be a bit of a problem, but if the main car park is already full there should be space on the side of the main road - this is free but requires a fair bit of trudging with kit up the road to the lifts (and back down again at the end of the day).
A day pass has now gone up to EUR 25, which is around CHF 37. There are also several cheaper options (see the price list), including morning tickets, afternoon tickets, and a points system where you pay a set number of points per lift.
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showing some of the runs and lifts |
There are roughly 3 areas to Feldberg - firstly the peak of Seebuck (the highest point in the ski area) with two parallel chair lifts (a 6-er and a slower 2-er) and a drag lift. Here you can find wide, fast reds and blues, and also some fairly substantial queues for tickets and lifts. There's a small jump park with a few jumps and rails just by the bottom of the 6-er chairlift.
If you continue down past the bottom of the drag lift (marked 'D' on the map), you come over a snow-covered bridge over the main road, and enter the second area on the opposite slope. Note that contrary to appearances on the map, you don't come out by the two lifts marked 'G', but rather drop down to F and then E. These four drag lifts are lower than the Seebuck side and give access to a few short blues.
The third area, just around the corner, can be reached by cutting left from the top of these drags. It drops all the way down to 950m with the aid of machine-made snow, and apart from the blue down at the bottom is mainly full of reds and blacks, steeper than the rest of the resort and rather more scraped. The drag at the far right of the map, marked 'K', is so steep and long (about 440m vertical ascent) that snowboarders aren't allowed on it - they have to use the longer and flatter lifts marked 'I' and 'H'.
Obviously if you don't like drag lifts, don't come to Feldberg - you'll quickly get tired of the pair of parallel chair lifts here, and the queues for them. Most of the drags are reasonably friendly, with just a few bumpy stretches to watch out for.
There are no really flat bits to make you start hopping, the only awkward bits are getting from one T-bar to the other at the Mittelstation, and getting back from the second area across to the Seebuck side.
8 January 2006 - There's been no fresh snow falling for a week or so, but there's still plenty around (machine-made lower down). Amazingly there's still some soft between the trees, but you have to know where to find it. On the slopes it's packed but very rideable, and only a few small scraped icy patches on the reds and blacks near Fahler Loch.
Resort information is at feldberg-schwarzwald.de, which has webcams, prices, and snow conditions. The all-important piste plan is at liftverbund-feldberg.de (if it hasn't moved again).
The flat, open summit of Seebuck provides an excellent windy plateau for snowkiters. These intrepid types use ordinary snowboards or skis, but then add a harness and a big aerofoil-style kite (with an inflatable leading edge to help prevent collapses) to let them surf around, backwards and forwards, downhill and uphill! pulled by the wind. Looks very cool, even without any mammoth gliding spinning jumps, and this windy summit seems ideal for it.
