Larches and Sgraffito Part 1: The Lower Engadine

I left Innsbruck with a mission: to see larches in their autumn glory.

When I first ran among these trees in the Alps last summer, I was in Zermatt. After experiencing the unique feel larches lend to a forest, I quickly became intrigued by this deciduous conifer. (If “deciduous conifer” feels like too much botany for you, read: a cone-bearing, needled tree that drops its needles in the winter.)

I had seen pictures of yellow and orange swaths of forest running like ribbons of flame across alpine ridges, and these photos were spectacular. “So, when do the larches change?” I asked a hotel bartender in Zermatt when I found out she’d been raised in the area.

“Oh, late October,” she replied. This took me by surprise, since I’d lived for a decade in the Tetons, where the aspens got going in mid-September and were often done by the first week in October. Late October seemed, well, late. The likelihood of my ever being in the Alps in late October seemed slim; nevertheless, I filed the chunk of information in the back of my mind.

It crept back into the forefront of my mind as I began to plan a three-month trip to Europe for this fall, and then it took front and center in my mind as, in September, I started to see a few larches with yellow tips and branches in Italy’s Dolomites.

Shortly thereafter, I made a decision. I was going to focus my itinerary on leaf-peeping (or, in this case, I guess it’s “needle peeping”).

A little research revealed that some of the best fall larch color happened in Switzerland’s two highest cantons: Valais and Graubünden.

I had already spent a big chunk of time in the Valais earlier in the trip, and October found me much closer to the canton of Graubünden. So, that area became my target.

I started monitoring the local government’s larch tracking website (it features webcams from several ski towns) and quickly determined that the Engadine—the valley created by the Inn River that runs through the southern part of Grabünden—was where the action was.

Luckily, I was in Innsbruck, a city on the lower part of the Inn River, so all I had to do was keep heading upstream. I stopped first in the western Austrian town of St. Anton von Arlberg, then took three busses in order to cross the border into Switzerland and arrive in the village of Scuol (population 4500), the principle town in what’s called the Lower Engadine.

In addition to being well-known for its stunning natural beauty, the Engadine’s claim to fame is that it is the center of the Romansch culture and language. Romansch is the fourth of Switzerland’s official languages (German, French, and Italian are the other three).

It’s thought to have descended from Vulgar Latin (the spoken language of the Roman empire), and, because its speakers lived in the mountains, it evolved in isolation and was less influenced by the more common tongues of central Europe. About 35,000 people consider Romansch to be their native language, and they all live in the Engadine.

The most visible Romansch cultural legacy is its unique architectural style. In both the Upper and Lower Engadine, most of the traditional buildings have plastered exteriors—some brightly colored—that are inscribed with sgraffito.

Sgraffito, which originated in Italy and was introduced to the Engadine area in the 15^th century, involves scratching or carving designs into plaster. Much of the sgraffito you see on Engadine structures is purely geometric, especially when it runs along doorways, window frames, or wall edges. But some of it is representational, even to the point of creatively rendering fantastical figures.

Needless to say, sgraffito-adorned buildings are incredibly picturesque. They make wandering around towns to find new and different designs a non-stop source of fascination.

When I edit photos for my blogs, I usually try to pull out 25-40 images and drop them in a folder from which I choose the ones that make the final cut. For this post, my folder contained 150 pictures. I had to do multiple rounds of winnowing, and, as you can see, I still couldn’t resist including a lot of them.

It’s also fun to read signs and inscriptions in Engadine towns. I can speak Spanish and French fairly well and have a passing familiarity with Portuguese and Italian, so attempting to decipher words and phrases that looked a little bit familiar (and a lot more familiar than German!) kept my brain occupied.

Take for instance, chasa, the word for house. As most folks know, that’s casa in Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. It’s cesa in Ladin—another somewhat obscure Latinate language spoken in a mountain area, the Dolomites.

It’s also a little mind-boggling—especially when you end up with words that appear to be missing vowels in key spots or have seemingly random punctuation. The gondola outside of Scuol is located in a town called Ftan. I rode a bus headed to a town called Vna, and one of my hikes left from the village of S-charl.

Of course, in addition to running around and checking out cool small towns (which, by the way was free: Both the Upper and Lower Engadine regions give you “tourist cards” with your accommodations that enable you to hop on and off all area trains and busses), I was there to check out larches.

When I first got to Scuol, I found some trees in various states of yellowing up on the ski hill. I did a couple runs on the north side of the valley where I found some good patches of color, but it seemed I was a little early for the trees at that elevation.

So, I set my sights on S-charl, the strangely-named tiny village touted as the smallest settlement in Switzerland (it has only two year-round residents). It’s up a long valley adjacent to the Swiss National Park. The map suggested that it would be high and forested and would allow easy access into the rocky peaks above.

First, though, I had to wait for the weather to clear. While the internet often yields only brilliant photos of fall in the Alps—ones featuring blue skies and pristine snow-capped peaks (and I’m as guilty as anyone of selecting these)—the reality is that dark, wet days with very low cloud ceilings do happen in October, and I experienced a handful of them.

I used these days to catch up on work and go to the local pool while watching good old MeteoSuisse, the Swiss weather app, in search of my ideal window.

The night before I went to S-charl, it poured rain and the mountains were completely obscured. This made the snow-capped peaks I woke up to all the more brilliant.

I ran down to the grocery store and got on the S-charl Post Bus with about 20 other eager-looking hikers to head up the narrow (and at points, washed out) road to the village.

As soon as we rounded the final corner, I knew I’d chosen the right spot. It was mind-blowingly beautiful. The town itself was cute and picturesque, as all towns in the Lower Engadine seem to be.

But, more than that, the combination of vibrant green grass, electric blue sky, blindingly white new snow—and, yes, fiery swaths of larch trees—was jaw-dropping.

I had no plan for what I was going to do in S-charl; I just brought a map and my phone with Kamoot all loaded up and figured I’d head off in whichever direction looked good. And that direction was east out of town and up the Aval S-charl drainage.

From my vantage point at the bus stop, it was the direction in which I saw the most larches, the fewest clouds, and the biggest peaks.

It was perfect.

The next day the weather turned. I was incredibly grateful that I’d gotten such a magical day in S-charl. I even thought that perhaps I’d scratched the larch itch and could leave the Engadine for warmer climes.

But it turns out those trees have a powerful pull.

So my next post will be about, yes, the Upper Engadine.