Pistes and lifts
What you can ski here
AlpineSnowboardSnowpark
Run counts and piste kilometres are indicative. Green runs only exist in France, Spain, Andorra, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Japan, the United States, Morocco, Algeria, Lesotho, South Africa, Egypt, Canada, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand; Italy, Austria, Switzerland and Germany start at blue. Indicative average snow depth near the top of the resort, in cm.
Get to know the resort
Wildhaus is the kind of Swiss village that arrives in front of you without much warning. You leave the eastern motorway, climb up into the Toggenburg, and at 1,090 m the road opens into a long meadow with the great wall of the Churfirsten on one side and the Säntis at the head of the valley. There are no high-rises, no purpose-built quarter: the village is mostly Tannenholz, the traditional Toggenburger silver-fir architecture, with low farmhouses, a parish church and a hotel or two from the 19th century. The reformer Huldrych Zwingli was born here in 1484, and the historical weight of the place is part of why it has resisted the worst impulses of resort development.
The ski area, Wildhaus-Gamserrugg, runs from the village floor up to 2,262 m on the Gamserrugg peak, with 60 km of piste served by 16 lifts. The bulk of the terrain is intermediate, twenty kilometres of blue and fifteen of red, with five black sections to give the better skier something to chew on. Snow-making covers the lower returns, which matters at 1,090 m of base altitude, while the upper sectors near the Gamserrugg and the linked Oberdorf hold their own naturally through most winters. The lift system links cleanly with the smaller Unterwasser-Toggenburg sector across the valley, doubling the skiable terrain on a single pass.
The character of the place is family, which here is not a marketing word: it is the deliberate calibration of beginners' meadows, ski-school numbers, kindergartens at the lift base, and a closing time that matches when small children get cold. The other half of the appeal is the panorama. From the top of the Gamserrugg you look straight across at the Churfirsten ridge, and on a clear day the Säntis closes the western horizon: the great defining shape of eastern Switzerland, which most of the country recognises but very few skiers see this close.