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Lenzerheide
1'550 m
Graubünden
The Lenzerheide is the gentlest of crossings – so gentle, and so thoroughly settled, that it is barely a pass at all.
1'550 m
Graubünden
The Lenzerheide is the gentlest of crossings – so gentle, and so thoroughly settled, that it is barely a pass at all.
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The Lenzerheide is the gentlest of crossings – so gentle, and so thoroughly settled, that it is barely a pass at all. The road from Chur climbs to a broad, sun-drenched high valley, cradling the Heidsee lake, before dropping to Tiefencastel and on toward the Julier Pass and St. Moritz. Reaching about 1,549 metres, with a maximum gradient of 11% and open all year, it long served as a handy shortcut that spared travellers the difficult Schinschlucht gorge below. Indeed the summit is so unassuming, and so lined with villages, that nobody ever bothered to call it a mountain pass at all, nor would any official document.
Today the high valley is the heart of Arosa Lenzerheide, one of Graubünden's largest ski areas: linked to Arosa by cable car in 2013, with slopes approved for the full FIS Alpine Ski World Cup, while the 41-hectare Heidsee draws swimmers in summer and cross-country skiers when it freezes in winter. For road cyclists the climb up from Chur is a long, first-category effort, valued less for itself than as a gateway to the greater passes beyond, the Albula and the Julier. The Lenzerheide is really a place more than a pass – a lake, a resort, a sunlit shelf in the mountains – rather than a line drawn over a ridge.
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