Skibike Italy - Kronplatz

Ladin Country, Sud Tyrol, Italy. Kronplatz a new venue for us.

As you travel around the European Alps you come across areas which seem to belong to another era and others that speak a dialect so strange that although you can recognise the core language, it's simply impossible to even begin to understand what anyone is trying to tell you.
From France, where the locals speak so fast that I have no chance of any decryption, to Austria and Saalbach, where there has been so much foreign influence that the German is simple and easy going, enough to grab a quick word or two. Onto Alpbach where the dialect is hard Austrian and finally to Ladin country, where the language is all of its own and spoken only by 20000 people in total. Hear Ladin in full flow, it’s nice to hear, but totally in a world of its own.
 

Kronplatz - wide open slopes

So to St Vigil, Sud Tyrol, Italy, Ladin Country, at the very head of a valley this lovely little town is a little gem if you want quiet and unsophisticated village life, it's bigger than you may imagine and is quite full of very high quality hotels ( check out Hotel Carmen a 3 star hotel punching well above its weight with its; 5 course meals, huge rooms, top wellness area and friendly staff, all for €78 a night, now if you want to impress the girls, lads !), small ski shops and better still, right on the edge of the Kronplatzski area and with a 20 minute free bus ride, Alta Badia and the Sella Ronda the other way. The usual big church surrounded by a small number of shops and a limited number of bars and pizza style restaurant’s, typically Italian but with that Tyrol flavour. Got the picture, it’s nice, well worth a visit summer or winter. Do check out the local red wine, it’s stunning, available only locally and unfortunately not available in the UK, damn.

So what is the ski area of Kronplatz like for a skibiker? Well get your arses there and give it a go, if you are beginning to skibike and want a friendly easy area then you can’t go wrong; American boulevard skiing at its best, long blues and reds, all very flattering and carefully maintained. Black runs that are, well, tough reds in reality, are long and would be a challenge to the average skibiker, tough enough to test you but wide enough and with an escape route at the halfway points to let you off if needed.
Be careful of the St. Vigil side black run towards Piccolino, at the top it has a quite a steep pitch of about 200 metres, most skibikers would struggle, particularly in the mornings when it was very icy as we went down heading for the buses that would take us into the lifts of Alta Badia, which incidentally as far as I’m aware, are not skibike friendly.
 

So typical of the Dolomites

Add in all new bubble lifts everywhere, main line train stations built into the base of the lift system at Perche, a social après ski area at the base at Bruneck and loads of Tyrol style mountain restaurant’s, it’s quite a gem. Looking at the ski map it may look small, but the area is vast, some of the runs are over 8km long of 100m wide piste, real French 3 Valleys style, without the expense and vast numbers of people.

There are some downsides of course, the mountain is just like a big upturned ice cream cone with the lifts all ending at the top plateau ( where there is the Concordia 2000 peace bell,  one of the biggest active bells I have ever seen and well worth the wait at 12.00 o’clock to see it wind up and chime the requisite 12 chimes of noon ), its tree sparse at the top and the piste so wide that in poor weather it could be a problem. Equally because the piste are so wide and even, you find yourself thinking that you are skiing out the area quickly, although in reality you are just scratching the available area ( remember the Dolomite Superski of which Alta Badia is part of, is 1200kms of piste and over 400 lifts ) . Also because the pistes are wide, every available run is groomed and hence off piste is quite limited. Be careful also about when you want to visit, it’s quite a long way South and will close late March if Easter is late as per this year.
 

Concordia peace bell at the top of Kronplatz

All in all though a gem of a place for skibiking and well worth a visit.

Say Hello Wave Goodbye - Rome Via The Mont Blanc Tunnel

As everyone seems to be getting all stoked up over the forthcoming ski season, I have  decided to step slightly outside of the remit of this blog and slip in some reportage from a recent trip to Rome. Why? because I got to see some real snow.
Normally, Rome is just a 2 hour flight from any of the London Airports, but for various reasons I was asked to take a van overland from the UK and back. This is a distance of around 1200 miles and at least a 2 day road trip in each direction.

There would be the chance to make an overnight stay in Ferney-Voltaire near Geneva, have dinner with my older sister, who has done so much to "sponsor" accommodation on my many trips to the Alps and also drive past my spiritual winter home.
The down side was that I wasn't going to be able to stop off and go walking or biking, it would be strictly a case of "Say Hello Wave Goodbye" whilst heading down the A40 Autoroute Blanche at a steady 65 mph. On the up side this would be my first journey through the Mont Blanc tunnel which cuts through the highest mountain in the European Union and was, for a time, the longest highway tunnel in the World.

The Mont Blanc tunnel - once the longest highway tunnel in the World

The entrance to the tunnel on the French side is accessed by a huge long and very exposed viaduct, which winds it way up to the surprisingly high entrance at 1274m (over 4000 feet). On a calm and warm September morning it was blissful, but this must be a daunting place to wrangle a heavy goods vehicle in winter time. 
Once you have passed through the toll gates the journey is somewhat of an anticlimax, following a disastrous fire in 1999, speed and minimum distance restrictions are actively enforced. I rolled through at around 50 mph in my Iveco 3.5t van, always keeping the correct two blue marker lights distance from the truck in front. A discipline, I should add, sadly lacking in the Italian cars whizzing towards France bumper to bumper.
On the Italian side you catch a quick glimpse of Courmayeur before heading rapidly down the Aosta valley through a long sequence of smaller tunnels.

When in Rome... visit the colosseum

A week later with my job in Rome all done and dusted, it was time to head back in the reverse direction. This time, thanks to some clever wheeler dealing by my guvnor, we where both to make at overnight stop in the village of Pré-Saint-Didier some 10 Km from the tunnel at the charming Locanda Bellevue hotel.

Pré-Saint-Didier at dusk

I have to confess that I had never heard of Pré-Saint-Didier but it is just below the much better known ski resort of Courmayeur. The village itself is very quaint and much larger than it first appears from the main road, it reminded me a little of Andorra, where every last scrap of free space has some or other vegetable or fruit growing on it. It must have been a very poor and isolated place before the tunnel opened, made Geneva a little over an hour's drive away and brought a steady stream of tourists eager to ski, hike and soak in the thermal baths.
Having made a little exploration, we returned to the Locanda Bellevue hotel and enjoyed a great evening meal, most notable was the starter; a mountain stew of broad beans, dumplings and croutons covered with a thick coating of melted cheese. I had just enough room left for a jumbo salad and some wine, but desert would have been a bridge too far.
Other diners seemed to have no problem making their way through piles of typical mountain fare; cold meat platters, cheeses, roasted joints and being Italy, pizzas and ice cream too.

Locanda Bellevue hotel - room with a view

The following morning, it was a crisp 8 degrees as I departed, a far cry from the 28 degrees it had been in Rome. There had been fresh snow higher up on the Mont Blanc, I stopped just by the tunnel on the French side to grab a few snaps then headed homeward. I struggled against the pull as I passed Cluses, the exits for the Portes du Soleil and The Grand Massif, this was work, pleasure will come later this year.

Fresh snow on the Mont Blanc

Oh and if the title for this post has gone over your head, especially if cheesy 80's queer synth-pop isn't your thing, here's a little bit of bad education for you.

Wayne's Italian Excursion

Waynes Part 3: Italy and the Ski Dolomiti

I have skied in some big interconnecting areas this year and I thought Ski Amade was big, but the Ski Dolomiti, the 4 Ladin valleys Alta Badia, Val Gardena, Val di Fassa,  Livinallongo is just unbelievably feckin huge. You can ski all day and not really touch a mere fraction of the available slopes. Looked it up and yup, only 450 lifts and 1200km of piste to choose from, all on the one ski pass. I have to say on one clear day from the highest point at Arabba, you could look in every direction and as far as the eye could see, you could see ski lifts. Awesome or what, or if you are of that eco way inclined, sheer purgatory.

As far as the eye can see, lifts and yet more lifts

 

Sadly without the ski bike, on a family holiday at half term is always not a bright idea, but my daughter is a school teacher and needs must. So to Ortisei we went and what a charming Sud Tirol town, built in a semi strange architecture which I cannot place ( do enlighten me ) but a real charmer of an old fashioned Italian town with all the mod cons of a pretty decent ski area interconnecting to the Sella Ronda lift system via Santa Cristina, with its new underground train shuttle linking the two sides of the valley.

Val Gardena is a real mix of old and new with some of the oldest chairlifts on the Alpe Di Suisi I have seen and yet there are 100 person cable cars and plenty of new 6 seaters in the Santa Cristina area. Lots of different ability slopes and some pretty impressive long runs of about 12km available if you want. Nothing really hard and difficult but big wide open slopes that are well looked after and a good snow record, what more can you want.

Old hotels on the road passes double as ski resturants in the winter

The Sella Ronda loop is a loop that runs either clockwise or counter clockwise around the massif of the Sella mountain range, keep that great big rock face on your left or as we did the following day, on the right. About 8000 metres of vertical and about 50 km of downhill run, it’s a pretty hectic 6 hours or so to get from Ortisie, to Santa Cristina and then onto the Sella Ronda proper and back home to, yes we found it, a really cool little bar just before bottom station which served the thickest hot chocolates for the girls and good beer for the boys. Along the way you’ll experience every type of lift known to man and ski some pretty tasty runs. One of the ski things that I have heard about ( about 20 years ago there was a section that horses pulled you across a flat area on your skis ) and needed to be ticked off as being done in my ski career.

So there has to be a downside doesn’t there. Well yes and no, pretty impressive resort but at peak times we had some long queues, nearly an hour to get from village level to the top at Ortisei one morning. If you can avoid that 10 o’clock morning rush by leaving a bit earlier then the waiting time seemed to get down to the 30 minutes or so. Once everyone had spread out though, queues seemed to be few and far between. My guess out of peak season there would be no problems. The other thing that sort of niggled me was Italy just isn’t cheap at all. In neighbouring Austria we could get a good soup and bread roll for lunch at 5 Euro or so, Italy it was closer to 9, beers a Euro dearer and the lift pass a good 30 Euros dearer for the week. The Wiener Schnitzel test,  about 2 – 3 Euros more expensive. Over a week it does add up and even though we stayed in some great but reasonable accommodation ( Garni Floreal ) at 32 Euro a night inclusive of breakfast, it was an expensive ski holiday. But don’t let me put you off, it is very very nice and worth a visit.

Umm, is it ski bike friendly, I asked at the lift pass office and they couldn’t say as no one had asked the question before, I didn’t see any ski bikes, a couple of SnowScoots on the Sieisa, on a lift servicing a  toboggan run ( they do like these runs in the Tyrol area ) but that was it. But here is the big but and I think this is starting to happen on other lift systems as well. A lot of the chairs had children anti “fall off the lift” restrictors fitted. Difficult to describe, but basically a strip of thick plastic, which when the safety bar is down, fits down between your legs and literally locks you in place. It would certainly be a problem for the way I transport the bikes up the lift and it really niggled my snowboarding daughter who has to sit sort of cross ways to accommodate the board, the said plastic restrictor kept on pinching her legs. With the death of the young English girl a few weeks ago just down the road from Ortisei, when she fell from the chair lift, then I can only see more of these being fitted.

Do give the Dolomiti Superski a go, the region and the Dolomite mountains are very different in so many ways and yet charming in their own way.