TR Corvara (Alta Badia, Italy) Jan 25-Feb1

[Cantabrigienne]

Corvara is one of the key villages on the famed Sella Ronda in Sudtirol - the German-speaking part of Italy that used to be Austria prior to WW1. I spent a week in Corvara last summer & had made 3 summer visits to Ortisei in Val Gardena, the next valley over (home of the better known Selva di Gardena) over the past decade but this was my first ski trip to the Dolomites.

I met up my with my middle sister & parents who were flying out from Hong Kong. Bit of an extravagance when I live in Vancouver and (normally) have a season pass for Whistler. But it's such a vastly different experience - and with a 80yo father who only started to ski in the last decade, it seemed like something the family should do before it gets too late. (Another plus: private lessons in Italy are less than half the cost of Whistler). We flew into Munich & had 4hr transfer in a Mercedes van taxi - we typically take the train in the summer, but skiing involves more luggage & my parents are getting a bit too old to run for connecting trains with suitcases! Our hotel (Ciasa de Munt) was a 5-8 minute walk from gondola base and 1-5 minute walk to multiple good restaurants in the evening.

Day 0 aka changeover day - many family-run hotels in the Alps limit peak season bookings to 7 night stays that start on Saturday, in order to optimize room bookings. This is known as changeover day (for those thinking about Diva Europe 2021: if you can do a Sunday-Sunday stay, odds are you'll have an amazing day on Saturday when the slopes are quiet). Walked over to the gondola base to buy lift passes, which clocked in at EUR290 or C$430/US$320 for a 6 day Dolomiti Superski pass. We thought about getting dad the more limited Alta Badia pass for around EUR230 - but it turned out we were able to buy him a pay-per-ride points card with about EUR100 loaded on it, figuring as a beginner he wouldn't get much value out of the full pass. Annoyingly, the ski school & rental place were in a separate building from the gondola, so it looked like we'd have to trudge across a carpark every morning.

Rentals ran about EUR130-150 for 6 days for anything that wasn't a soft beginner ski (they tried to push a Rossignol Nova 2 on my sister when she asked for an advanced ski!) and with most of the skis were race or carving skis, it was a very unfamilar bunch of skis on offer...my sister ended up on Volkl Race Tigers & I picked Head Absolut Joy. (Our regular rides are Blizzard BP88 and Volkl Yumi respectively). The 1 week locker rental wasn't cheap but it was hi-tech + cushy - the lock was coded onto our ski pass and we just held it up to a fob reader to pop open our locker, which had 4x boot driers & 4x glove driers built into the locker!



Day 1: turns out you walk out of the ski school & can ride a button lift to access 1) the main gondola (Boe); 2) the "cross town" Borest gondola that takes you to Colfosco, the adjacent town or 3) another 4 person chair that lets you ski across town to catch the *other* gondola (Col Alt). After consulting with the jokey blokes of the Snowheads forum (UK-based board similar to Epic), I had determined that the best place for warmup runs was over in Colfosco. Button lifts are a joy to ride vs t-bars since you ride up solo. Took the cross-town gondola to Colfosco (a gentle 30 min stroll away in the summer!) to jump on the Sodlisia chair, which served both a nice wide bunny slope AND as a link into the Sella Ronda. Not the greatest combo as many folks were just straightlining to make the connection, but luckily it was a super wide run & plenty of room to do stupid exercises to warm up.




Three laps of the bunny slope and then over to what the Brits like to call Edelweiss valley - a west facing set of slopes above Colfosco. Summer 2019 they had been building a new 6seater to replace a drag lift, as this area is the main progression of slopes for the ski school - the Dolomites had a couple of epic dumps in Nov & Dec but no fresh snow for all of January. As a result, the red runs in this area seemed both quieter and easier to ski because they were in good condition vs the hardpacked blue runs that were seeing more traffic.



After a few laps we skied back down to Colfosco to catch the gondola up to Passo Gardena to eat at the Jimmy Hutte. I'd stopped there in the summer to chug down some fresh buttermilk before starting a hike (and spotted the same kid who served me in the summer who was *still* wearing a plastic cowboy hat adorned with steampunk goggles. I guess he's nailed down an easy way to be memorable....) We thought there was a long queue for a table but in the end we were escorted upstairs to the stube. It's one of the more renown rifugios/huttes in the area - the kind of place with a 10,000 bottle cellar and some super serious looking food. I had veal check on pine risotto & think my sister had a barley risotto. Adding in a bottle of mineral water and an apfeschorle (half apple juice, half fizzy mineral water), about EUR40 or US$45/C$60 - for waiter service and Michelin red plate calibre cooking! With tax & tip, I'd be spending at least C$90 for something in the same vein at Christine's on Blackcomb.



Skied back down to Colfosco - noting that this run back was about 1/8 the total distance of the Sella Ronda - a lovely red (harder intermediate) run at the top and a motorway wide blue piste at the bottom that other folks straightlined. Back to Edelweiss Valley for a few more laps and then called it day - a pretty modest 8,500 ft of vertical. (I'm embarrassed to admit that the Epicmix app tells me that's in line my average day at Whistler in 2018/19, when I decided I would have short but effective days by skiing straight from 11ish to 1ish to minimize time in lines while everyone else is at lunch)

 

[Cantabrigienne]

Day 2: "You can't get there from here"

Woke up to a bluebird day but saw that the forecast was for cloudy days for the rest of the week, so at breakfast we offered to take mom up the biggest gondola (Boe) while dad was at his lesson. Our hotel also runs the hutte up there (Piz Boe Alpine Lounge) so we had the option to have breakfast up there instead of at the hotel, for a kind of first tracks kind of experience (notwithstanding that you couldn't go up any earlier than the first gondola at 8:30) + thought we'd scope that out.

For anyone used to the zoo that is mid-mountain lunch at most places in N.America it's enough to make you weep that *this* is the cafeteria option in Corvara (granted at 10:30am and anyone sane was having their coffee outside in the sun):



While mom was busy snapping away, taking pics of the amazing scenery like this:


...my sister and I were watching people at the top of what looked like a really tough red run (22 or 22a?), which looked comparable to The Saddle at Whistler - something I still find pretty darn steep & would never do as my first run of the day.



After watching someone go in way too hot and yardsale a long way down, we scan the ski map and realize that it's only reds from this gondola & perhaps the generous grading of runs over at Edelweiss Valley is not indicative of *everything* in Alta Badia, which has the reputation for easy-peasy cruising.
We headed out to take a few more photos and noticed the traffic from the Sella Ronda had really built up - Boe is one of the key junctions where both the easier anti-clockwise green route & the more challenging clockwise orange route intersect:



I guess the easy-cruising reputation is partly based on the cushy approach to skier management - to save people walking about 30m uphill (max 3m or 10ft vertical), there is a magic carpet installed...right after the slopeside bar. We *suspected* that there was an easier entrance to the red 22 back to Corvara but my sister was onboard with me wimping out and offering to escort mom back down the gondola (it would be terrible to leave your 81yo mom who's about 4'10" to fend for herself against a crush of Italian skiers, right?)

So we downloaded and skated over to the 2nd town lift, which runs parallel to the main village street of Corvara and lets you ski behind the hotels and *through a tunnel under the road* to connect to the other main gondola, Col Alt. This takes you up to the main slopes for Corvara, known as the Praloghia plateau, which link to neighbouring towns of La Villa & San Cassiano - each about a 10 minute drive away. The end of the plateau connects to Passo Campolongo, which links to yet another ski area, Arabba, which is in Veneto province (ie closer to Venice and Cortina, and where German stops being an official language)

Luckily we had hiked here in the summer, so we kind of knew our way around BUT with such a massive ski area, the ski map was hard to decipher because it was often hard to tell which way was up for some of the runs - if only they would add little arrows to show the directions of the runs. I used to live in Boston, where one of the city catchphrases is "you can't get theyah from heyah"

https://skimap.org/data/2053/2205/1575110339jpg_render.jpg

Aimlessly cruised around some pretty flat pistes - all the better for leaving us free to gawk at the scenery:


Found ourselves at Rifugio Bioch, where we had eaten a spectacular meal this summer. Charming waiter tells us very apologetically that the linguine with mussels and bottarga (a feature dish created by one of the many Michelin-starred restaurants in Alta Badia - the place is a serious gastronomic destination...) is sold out already (at 12:20!) so we end up splitting a plate of linguine alfredo, admitting to ourselves that with such a low mileage day we can't really pig out at lunch.

The scale of the map gives zero sense of relative distance - I try plotting a route over to Passo Campolongo so we can have a peek at Arabba and see if we want to ski more over there, as the slopes are supposed to be a bit more challenging - but the Via del Sol seemed to go on forever, a lot longer than a 2.9km run should feel. Ended up at Cherz, where I had eaten an excellent buckwheat cake this summer but that didn't seem worth fighting through these crowds to eat:



The ski home was like pretty much any home run in any ski resort: the worst combo of frightened beginners and showoffs laying out big GS turns. The homerun in Corvara funnels into a slope with a steepish rake down to the right and then up and over a bridge - those in the know gun it to get enough speed over the bridge. Unfortunately, the far side of the bridge had become all mogulled up by 3pm, which must've been pretty daunting for beginners, but one is supposed to schuss down that in order to get enough speed for another little uphill stretch to get you back to the junction where the intra-Corvara lift, the Boe gondola & the cross-town Borest gondola met up. Since we lost all that chance for momentum trying to carefully pick our way around traumatized new skiers, there was a long-ish skate back home, which I guess made up for our lack of real mileage.

 

[newboots]

Wow! Pretty impressive to go to Italy to ski! My big ski trips tend to be from Vermont to an adjacent state, like New York or New Hampshire!

 

[Cantabrigienne]

Day 3: What happens when the Sella Ronda is shut for the day:

You'd think that people who go skiing would be happy when it snows - but for the stylish cruisers of Alta Badia, actual snow falling from the sky seemed to be greeted as a disaster.

The lift line for the town lift (Costes da l'ega) over to Col Alt is a sh.t show and we realize with the Sella Ronda shut down due to high winds (not in evidence in Corvara). With snow starting to fall, it becomes clear to us that everyone else is headed to that gondola, for lack of an alternative destination. As Whistler regulars, we're not that fussed about attempting to stay dry - there's a reason chic Italian skiwear is routinely only 5,000mm waterproofing standard vs the minimum of 20k waterproofing standard needed to stand up the soggy mess we call Whistler. (I also had to talk my sister out of bringing 2 complete ski outfits, which often is needed when you get soaked in Whistler if you can't get everything to dry out overnight.) To be fair, the gondolas were mostly civilized affairs once you survived the merging process - I loved how they always had a way to park your skis in an orderly fashion so you don't end up dripping snow all over the other skiers - a nicety we can't have in Whistler where the norm is big planks for offpiste....no way these would fit into these slots!





Our attempt to get up to the plateau via a 4-person chair called Arlara is hampered by my inability to read the Alta Badia piste map and the fact you can't ski uphill with a 30m elevation gain.... so onto an interminably long button lift called Capanna Nera. Just as we're contemplating taking a 2nd button lift and then skiing over to the Arlara chair with grim resignation, we a see a bunch of people skating off to the right. So we follow them and end up at one of the three chairs labeled Pralonghia. This connection involves not one, but 2 tiny magic carpets: the first when you get off the button lift, to give you a teensy bit of elevation needed to schuss over to the Pralonghia chair, the 2nd because apparently people don't like to skate ski - the rise into the gates for the chair is literally only a metre high at most and well within even my skating ability.

The folks over at Snowheads all raved about the long blue runs going down to San Cassiano, so I dutifully steer us over in that direction. The 9 basically wound around the Pralonghia plateau down to San Cassiano for about 5km or 3 miles - the epitome of motorway piste cruising. As I'm prone to doing a park'n'ride on runs like this, it wasn't the most interesting skiing, much as I was enjoying the scenery. The queues at the San Cassiano gondola (Piz Sorega) confirmed our suspicions that the Sella Ronda traffic had been redirected into the plateau and we up on our idea of lapping the gondola and headed back. Toodled around a few runs and once again found that the blue run vs red run distinction seemed a bit arbitrary: the 16B off the Bamby chair looked legit steep (and sounded nasty, from all the scraping) but we found the 23 red to be a nice rolling cruiser. With the inch of fresh snow starting to crud up and get pre-mogully, we aimed ourselve back to Bioch to see if we could get the bortarga pasta if we rocked up prior to noon:



Mission accomplished! Once again we were splitting one plate of pasta, but this time supplemented by an amazing bowl of barley soup.

Spent the afternoon doing laps of the kids skiercross course: The tunnel through the cute snowhouse was about 5ft high and I'm 5'1" - my sister was doubled over laughing because I crouched really low to go through it and I probably could've just stood upright if I had just flexed my ankles a bit more



The ski run home had been flattened out by the time we made our way back to Corvara, so was able to schuss over the bridge and get a bit of momentum to avoid the long skate back to the ski school lockers.

 

[Cantabrigienne]

Day 4: In which the Cheng sisters finally crank up their skiing

Our hotel offered ski guiding if more than 4 guests signed up - we thought about joining the tour over to Ortisei, specifically to do the "James Bond run" - a 12km long run from the top of Seceda at ~2600m down to Ortisei village centre at ~1200m, which but the owner made it sound a bit daunting - leaving at 8:30 and getting back at 4:30 because of a notorious pinch point above Selva Gardena (off the Ciampanoi gondola) where I gather from the Snowheads forum that heavy Sella Ronda traffic on a particularly steep red (used to be black but was regraded to not scare people from doing the SR...) makes it a lovely combo of icy & heavily mogulled.

The view from the hotel breakfast room is always stunning, but the 5cm/2" that fell yesterday nicely filled in the bare patches on west-facing slopes at the valley level - see what a difference a day makes (also - see how much earlier I ate breakfast on Weds vs Mon!)



We opted for a shorter tour itinerary to the north end of the Alta Badia area, to an area called Santa Croce. Took our long-winded gondola avoiding route up to Pralongia plateau, skied over to San Cassiano again - and found that there were zero lines at the Piz Sorega gondola. The pistes were empty since everyone was on the Sella Ronda instead:



Skied the 23 red as a nice warmup for the highlight of the morning: the Gran Risa world cup run. (Enough of the lazy park'n'ride cruising!) Spotted the infamous Val Scura couloir en route to the Gran Risa: this was the last run Shane McConkey completed before he died basejumping off Sass Pordoi, another mountain nearby.



I've skied a bunch of Olympic & World Cup courses (the Dave Murray on Whistler is a peach of a run, even when it's just hardpack, the Hahnenkamm in Kitzbuhel reverts to a family-friendly red in February each year ) and the Gran Risa was by far the scariest...the FIS website tells me the steepest bit is 69 degrees. I think we skipped this by using the red run entry, which takes you around the top of the mountain instead of straight down, but the average gradient 36 degrees is about 3x steeper than what my ski tracker says is my average in Whistler.

A-framing my way down....I swear I could hear the skier behind me sighing about how I was scraping my way the hill and blocking the line for the lovely GS turns he had plotted out in his head....


Adrenaline shot for the day done, it was back to easy peasy cruising: Caught a funny little funicular from the bottom of the Gran Risa, skated through the parking lot for La Villa (think you have to click out and walk most of the year) and caught a funny series of bunny slope lifts to get over to the Gardenacia area. Cruised down a nice 2km long red run - really quiet - and caught another town lift (Praduc) which links La Villa to Badia.

La Crusc 1 lift was the first pedestrian-friendly chairlift I encounter on this trip, since the Santa Croce area is marketed quite heavily for winter walking - the Alta Badia area grooms at least 50km of winter hiking paths and while on the Praduc chair we saw several walkers on the path by the river that runs between Badia, La Villa, and Corvara. (Also noticed a bunch setting off from the top of the La Villa and San Cassiano gondolas, which makes sense since peds can easily take gondolas)

Last summer, the upper lift (La Crusc 2) was under construction and my family was too lazy to walk up to see the church, so we walked all the way down to La Villa instead. (I mean, my parents are 80 so the fact they're hiking at all is pretty impressive.) After taking the swanky new gondola (i think the seats were heated), it turns out we are just as lazy in the winter: the church (and a good rifugio) were at least 100m up the hill and my sister and I went, meh, can't be bothered to trudge uphill with our skis.



Guess what? Swift divine punishment for skipping church ensued. We skied down a short stretch back to the mid-station to have lunch at Rifugio Lee.....and we had the worst meal of the whole trip at this place, with gnocchi that was so uniform looking we assume it came from a supermarket packet vs "fatta in casa." To make things worse, we skied all the way down & i botched up videoing my sister who wanted to do some video analysis of *her* A-frame issues...and then a couple of lift rides later, I realized I had left my watch at Rifugio Lee. Sigh.

By this time, we've finally gotten the hang of the sequence of runs from top of Pralongia plateau back to Corvara & stopped getting lost all the time.

 

[marzNC]

I met up my with my middle sister & parents who were flying out from Hong Kong. Bit of an extravagance when I live in Vancouver and (normally) have a season pass for Whistler. But it's such a vastly different experience - and with a 80yo father who only started to ski in the last decade, it seemed like something the family should do before it gets too late. (Another plus: private lessons in Italy are less than half the cost of Whistler).

Thanks for sharing your European adventures with the family! I'll have to tell a new friend who did his first Taos Ski Week last week about your father. CY is in his early 70s. Had skied a little long ago but now has the time and interest to get more confident on groomers.

I've been to Europe a fair amount during the summers, but have put off skiing there until later on. I have a hunch that once I go for the first time, I'll want to go back. So many ski trip possibilities in N. America and around the world . . .

 

[marzNC]

You'd think that people who go skiing would be happy when it snows - but for the stylish cruisers of Alta Badia, actual snow falling from the sky seemed to be greeted as a disaster.

The reaction CY had to the 18-inch snowstorm at TSV was that it was too much snow and made skiing way too hard.

Did people take the entire day off after the snowstorm?

 

[Jenny]

Enjoying the write up!

 

[Cantabrigienne]

Day 5: We hit the Sella Ronda, at last!

We got on the button lift around 8:45, so a decently early start for a circuit that the tourist board says should take 5-6 hours: we've been warned there's really only 1.5hrs of solid skiing, but we know the signage is less than idiot-proof in these parts and we like to stop and fiddle with our boots, take pics etc on a too-frequent basis. Keeners on Snowheads say they can do the circuit 2x in a day (once in each direction) - and a local guiding outfit completed it 4x in a day, but they were going at Mach speed the whole time. https://blog.holimites.com/en/skiing-sellaronda-in-one-day/

Catch the same set of lifts and gondolas as on the afternoon of our first day, and then take another couple of short lifts to get to the top of Passo Gardena: glorious long hardpacked red run into Selva (700m vertical, 3km distance). Signage is less than robust and we waste a few minutes staring at signs trying to figure out if we're heading the right way or if we're picking the easier/harder route down. (By the end of the day, we'll have picked up the habit of picking what looks like the harder option each time, having learnt that the easier-looking option ends up with more traffic and worse conditions.)



At the end of the long Dantercepies run, you schuss (or skate) across the top of Selva village and then there are *gates* coordinated with the traffic lights so Sella Ronda skiers can cross the road to the Ciampanoi gondola: this BMW driver was confused and missed the light. Either that or they were just being very entitled.....and in any case was stopped by the traffic guard:



Up Campanoi, and we end up on a red I had vaguely registered as one I'd like to avoid: heavily trafficked, but with a narrow steep entrance down a ridge that flattens out - you know the kind where everyone is scared of the edge and so sticks to the middle, resulting in a luge track down the centre and heavy snow-crud-moguls on the side. I think it was this,

or this

.

Luckily it was early enough in the morning that it was just heavier snow on the outer 1/4 of the run, so I used that to smear some shorter turns to get to a more comfortable pace...the run eventually became a lovely rolling ride through the Plan de Gralba area (the equivalent of the Pralongia plateau for Selva), taking us to another gondola towards Passo Sella. At this hour, there are so many people on the Sella Ronda that it's hard to slow down and enjoy what is one of the most scenic sections, the "city of stones" - a flattish run that weaves between huge boulders (this part is even better in the summer, mind you, as it's filled with wildflowers)



One more short chairlift at we're at the halfway mark and it's 11:15am - not bad for a pair of slowpokes taking snowfies (that's a ski-selfie in Cheng-speak) at pretty much each chair/gondola....we overshoot the rifugio recommended by a bunch of folks on Snowheads and we end up at what should be a terrible option: a hutte directly on the main SR piste, Rodella 2222. (The theory is that eateries in prime locations don't need to work hard to attract customers, so one should plan to take small detours for better value food - this makes sense to me.) The kitchen wasn't open yet for lunch so we nursed an elderflower soda till 11:30 and salivated over the menu: what a dilemma choosing between:

• potato and black turnip gnocchi with truffle, gorgonzola, and nuts
• tagliatelle with venison ragout and argula
• tagliatelle with nettle pesto, Grankase fondue, and [Tyrolean crispbread] breadcrumbs

This was the best rifugio/hutte of the whole trip (and this is saying a lot when we went back to Bioch 3 times) because the food was awesome, the service very pleasant, but best of all: great toilets that we didn't have to walk down any stairs to use!!! Stunning views of the Sella massif from this hutte too:



After lunch, another long rolling red run (600m vertical, 3.2km long - about 2 miles), this time towards Canazei (in yet another valley, Val di Fassa) to pick up the last gondola of the day, and then a quad chair up to Passo Pordoi, which feels like the highest point in the circuit, because it feels like we're at eye level with the Sella massif:



After this it's down a combo of red and blue runs for the 800m vertical descent into Arabba, which I gather is the most hardcore of the towns around the Sella Ronda: It's in a narrow, deep valley so it doesn't attract folks who want to bask on terraces at lunchtime. The skiing is more demanding than around Corvara (although this run doesn't really reflect it), with a series of gondolas/trams up the the 3300m high peak of Marmolada + multiple off-piste itineraries on this side. Reading up about the Val Scura couloir above Corvara, it turns out people need to trek over to Arabba if they want to buy/rent the avy gear for offpiste skiing!

Onto a cross-town chairlift called Arabba Fly - which must've been built to avoid the kind of cross-town trek & inevitable skier-car conflict we saw in Selva - and up another chair towards the last pass of the day, Passo Campolongo, which will take us back to Alta Badia & Corvara. This video also gives you a good glimpse of the magic carpet

Sis declines the option of stopping for coffee & cake at Utia La Tambra (we stayed at the hotel of the same name & their food was superb so I figured their piste-side offering would be equally as tasty), so we headed up the lift that unloads about 100m below the Boe gondola.

Fun, fast red back to Corvara - but the end of which is the usual homerun sh.tshow. (I'm reminded of Zig Zag on Blackcomb, as there's a diagonal slope across the fall line, and a tendency for folks to get stranded on the upper side in their attempt to avoid the luge track of ice down the middle and the moguls at the bottom of the hill.) Was feeling pleased with my speed control up and over the bridge, as I slowed enough to check the exit for moguls and crashing beginners yet felt like I had enough speed to avoid a long skate home. Then some guy bombs past me screaming (in English) "You can't stop here!!!" No idea if that was aimed at me or the little kids whose instructor was not being very helpful in getting them over the bridge, since they didn't have the right combo of momentum & control to get them over in an orderly fashion and there was a lot of climbing going on.

The official resort app says we skied 26km and 4,200m vertical (about 14,000ft). I switched on roaming to let my tracker app work at the 40% mark at Plan de Gralba and we only did 56 minutes of active skiing after that!!! So the tourist board is pretty accurate when they say the actual amount of skiing time is about 90 mins vs an equal time sitting on chairs.

 

[Cantabrigienne]

Day 6: Back to Santa Croce

We thought about doing the more difficult orange clockwise Sella Ronda, but my sister lacked ski fitness since picking up a really gruelling adjunct teaching position in the fall semester & this similarly ruled out skiing over to Ortisei. So back to Santa Croce & Rifugio Lee to retrieve my watch...

What a difference it makes when you know where you're going! And when the Sella Ronda isn't shut - took the button to the town lift and scooted over to the Col Alt gondola - no queue at 9:30am - and took a now-familiar set of runs to a lovely winding blue run down to La Villa. This is clearly a small farm road/easy hiking trail in the summer & we passed a woman who was going for a winter stroll down this piste - she had poles but didn't need snowshoes. Watch was back on my wrist by 11am - asked our hotel to call to confirm they had found my watch the previous day, so it was waiting for me at the bar. FWIW, the other rifugio at mid-station (Nagler) has much nicer toilets (spacious, clean, well-lit - the loos at Lee were tiny & cramped and most hilariously, the energy-saving motion sensors meant the lights kept going out while women were still in the toilet stalls) even tho their hot chocolate tasted like whatever the Italian equivalent is for Swiss Miss.

Did some laps of Santa Croce, did some more laps of the quiet Gardenaccia chair on the other side of La Villa from the gondola - there was a little race course so we skied the gates a couple of times and videoed ourselves (the usual cringe - in my head I'm flexed low but I'm really standing bolt upright!!) Headed back to our beloved Rif.Bioch and it's fun to be greeted as a regular. A couple more laps of the kids skiercross course and then it was time to wrap up the week. This is the nice part of the blue homerun into Corvara, before it become chaotic:



Some thoughts on the week:

Lift line etiquette: There were some really dumb arrangements - the Biok chair that we constantly lapped to get across Pralongia was upgraded from a quad to a 6pax chair, but there are still only 4 ticket gates. So a wide crowd merged into the 4 gates, but then unmerged - and despite 5min + queues, quite often my sister and I found ourselves riding up by ourselves. (Alternative explanation: we are visibly East Asian and people might have been giving us a wide berth due to coronavirus fears!!! I should've pulled my gaiter down & coughed loudly to scare people away from us on the day there were big lineups due to the Sella Ronda shutdown.)

Slopeside luxuries: At one rifugio, there was a waxing station. Hand wax, not machine wax, for 6 euros. We did this on Tues - and on Weds found ourselves sliding backwards on one of the magic carpets!

Would I go back? Sure. There's so much I still hadn't skied even within just Alta Badia. I decided that this was going to be a fun week of skiing badly & not to have too many goals. At one point we said we'd split a full day or at least 3hr private, but concluded that even tho it was a relative bargain, it wasn't what we really needed. We spent a bit too much time on the same runs on the Pralonghia plateau & there were a couple of reported nice long reds that we didn't get round to skiing - so while the skiing wasn't always interesting, the scenery was always amazing. (I guess I should check out Banff/Lake Louise sooner rather than later...)

There's still the orange Sella Ronda, the Ortisei skitour, and also the Hidden Valley tour from the top of Lagazoi (the upper edge of Cortina's ski area) back to San Cassiano (it's nuts - you catch a horse-drawn sled at the end in lieu of a magic carpet or button to take you back to San Cass!) but that will have to wait for a repeat visit esp without my sister, as this tour involves a 15km taxi ride up 20 hairpin bends to start the day & she's prone to motion sickness.

What would I do differently? If I went back next year with my parents, I'd pick La Villa as a base instead. While it would be less fun for my mom (Covara has more shopping, plus 2 gondolas, so better for a pedestrian visitor), La Villa had a much better learner area in town & there are nice long blues that dad could work up to doing, plus he could work up to joining us for a few runs on the Pralongia plateau. I felt bad that he wasted so much private lesson time trekking over to Colfosco than Corvara. LV also has more of the accommodation that I prefer - apartments within or attached to hotels, so you can have the convenience of a hotel breakfast but cook yourself a healthier dinner a few times a week. Or I'd stay in Selva di Gardena instead, since I found several garni hotels with studio apartments. Another plus is that the ski school in Selva offers guided tours each for EUR80/day, something not on offer in Corvara (barring what my own hotel offered 1x a week), which would be the ideal way for me to do Hidden Valley sans barfing sister.

 

[Cantabrigienne]

Some thoughts about the cost of skiing in Europe to help out those you who are thinking about the proposed Divas trip to Europe in 2021:

A lot of my choices were dictated by accommodating the needs of 80yo parents, but if I were doing this on my own (with my sister or a friend) this is how costs would've stacked up:

Flight: Lufthansa to Munich from Vancouver: C$1200-1500, but I could take Icelandair for about C$1000-1100 instead. I think you can get much better fares from the US than Canada in general, right?

Transfer: Roundtrip 2nd class train ticket: EUR60 (non refundable basis) or EUR120 (flexible + reserved seat.) Tip: book 2 separate legs on the Austrian train service, OBB, rather than Germany's DB. (Direct coach transfer from airport to hotel is EUR125 each way, which is why a van taxi for a family of 4 made more sense)
Local bus to Corvara is basically free, but a roundtrip taxi transfer from train to hotel would be EUR180

Skipass: EUR290, ski rentals: EUR140. Normal people would just walk to the gondola in their boots & carry their skis - we watched a family do this through town down a steep cobblestone street!!!!

Hotel: I found a great 2* garni in the middle of Corvara with ski-in access for 70 euros/night/person inc breakfast that my parents were okay with staying at...but then they pushed our trip back by a week and the rooms weren't available. There's a ski-in/out place called Garni La Tranquilite that's around the same price. Our fancy 4* joint was 100-110 euros/ppn - and while not cheap, it was really good value with:

• Big rooms even by N.American standards - 25-30 sqm, enough room for me to layout a yoga mat and have space to move around it.
• A private ski locker for each room with built-in boot & glove dryers, like at the skischool. Don't what they have at the Fairmont Chateau Whistler......but seems pretty fancy to me vs the plain old locker at my sister's otherwise upscale condo complex in Whistler.
• Wellness area with 2 different saunas and a chill-out room - but no massages etc
• Locally made toiletries - but no disposables/sample sizes
• Coin-operated Miele washing machine!!
• Mellow little lounge/bar that mostly focused on cheese & charcuterie but did offer a couple of dinner options every night (had a stellar schnitzel the one night that we stayed in.)
• Ridiculously good breakfast: hot selections limited to fried eggs, scrambled eggs & bacon or sausages, but check out the cold options: proscuitto, speck & coppo; fresh mozarella & tomatoes; crudite platter of veggies; 2x harder mountain cheeses, 3 kinds of Germanic rye type breads, 2 types of rolls, a homemade coffee cake, couple different types of pastries. 3 different kinds of yoghurt. Homemade jams. Freshly made fruit salad plus 2 kinds of sliced fruit each day. 3 different kinds of honey & the fanciest toppings for cereal/yoghurt I've ever seen: puffed amaranth, propolis/bee pollen, ground flaxseed, hazelnuts, dried figs. Waitstaff circulated with a pitcher of fresh-squeezed juice combo of the day (e.g apple/beet/cucumber/ginger) & took coffee orders but just delivered hot water for tea (fancy selection of 6 different loose leaf teas, but Italians seem to like their teas much greener & weaker - the Aussies & I were perplexed by the otherwise lovely Assam and Darjeeling teas that we couldn't coax into a breakfast tea type brew...I gave up and drank sans milk as if it were Chinese or Japanese tea...)

I can't imagine spending C$300/night for a room and getting anything closely resembling this quality in Whistler - when I looked up how much the new pod hotel cost last summer they were asking for an average of C$300/night for their private room option!!! (I am seeing some pretty decent prices on Booking.com for mid-March in Whistler, mind you - I guess the dry start in December scared people off for the whole season.)

Food: We averaged 50 euros a day per person - and we ate at some pretty fancy places most of the time, though only dad had wine with dinner. You could easily get this down to 10euros for lunch (get a hearty goulash soup or go to the self-service cafeterias, which still have proper food cooked on site, not corporate catering from a can or freezer packet barring a few exceptions) and 20 euros for supper (we ate at the pizzeria that shares a kitchen with the Michelin 1-star Stua de Michil at Posta Zirm hotel for about 80 euros for the 4 of us - and it wasn't just pizza, we had pasta, veal shank, risotto, and a salad.) The folks on Snowheads said that food at the Michelin star places wasn't hugely more expensive....it's just the wine options that can send the bill to stratospheric levels. So call a reasonable food budget 300 euros/week per person.

This adds up to about 1200 euros/week if you're being reasonably thrifty; call it 1500 euros for a moderate budget (eg taxi from train station instead of bus & flexible train tickets) and 1800 for comfortable but not extravagant (eg direct coach transfer from Munich, a bit more for food.) Check the trip reports on Snowheads to see how Brits do the Dolomites on a budget - Corvara is the most expensive town on the whole Sella Ronda barring maybe Selva. Costs would be pretty similar for St Anton for hotels, not sure about food. Lift tickets are pretty similar across resorts e.g. 300 euros for 6 days is standard at the bigger place, which sounds so cheap vs any destination ski resort in N.America. (I realize most places do an accommodation-ticket bundle tho....)

 

[Cantabrigienne]

The reaction CY had to the 18-inch snowstorm at TSV was that it was too much snow and made skiing way too hard.

Did people take the entire day off after the snowstorm?

It was only 2-4" in the end!!! Not even a proper snowstorm, despite the high winds in parts of the Sella Ronda

 

[Christy]

These are fantastic posts. Thanks for sharing. It felt overwhelming to me reading about all the different runs and options. How did it feel trying to plan your skiing? How big is this area compared to Whistler?

 

[Cantabrigienne]

These are fantastic posts. Thanks for sharing. It felt overwhelming to me reading about all the different runs and options. How did it feel trying to plan your skiing? How big is this area compared to Whistler?

You're welcome - I've been meaning to blog some of my trips and I was thinking of the TR as something of a first pass at blogging.

European resorts list their size in km of (groomed) runs, vs in US & Canada resorts state their area in acres or hectares. This make sense insofar as you can ski everything within resort boundaries for most N.American resorts, whereas offpiste skiing is a distinct creature in Europe and people mostly don't go off the groomers unless the lines are very, very visible. However, a German ski consultant has measured the pistes in some of the bigger N.American resorts + it turns out Whistler has about 250km of pistes/routes (inc the bowls) https://www.pistenlaengen.com/en/ The Alta Badia area immediately around Corvara felt considerably smaller than Whistler, which makes sense as it has "only" 130km of slopes and not as much vertical for most part - you can't ski directly from the highest point to the lowest, so really it's more like a 600-800m resort. However, most folks would have also skied in nearby Arabba and Selva, which would've made it more similar in scale. (If we'd known how much good weather there would be later in the week, we wouldn't have wasted a whole morning taking my mom up the gondola & we'd have spent an afternoon skiing in Arabba for a change. But she enjoyed herself and really appreciated that we took her up, so it was all okay in the end.)

The other places I've skied in Europe - Kitzbuhel, St Anton, Zermatt - felt more like a regular mountain to me and the pistes weren't so hard to decipher. My sister and I would usually pick an area, ski over to it and then try out all the different chairs in the area and lap whatever we liked. Things weren't quite as interconnected when I went, so I didn't go "oh let's ski over to Lech from St Anton - we took a bus over to Lech, skied there and then took the bus back, iirc. This approach didn't work quite as well in Alta Badia, which is why on last day we repeated the Santa Croce journey because we knew there were a couple of small areas that we could lap.

The slight disappointment with Alta Badia is that at times the skiing feels incidental to the destination - because the area was built up from separate villages and with individual farmers (who set up rifugios from their barns) and hotels building their own lifts, there's quite a disjointed feel. There was one really comprehensive TR on Snowheads that I should have studied more carefully, as I think I could have gotten more quality ski time while on the Pralongia plateau, rather than feeling like I was just aimlessly cruising down big wide green runs to get to the next town over for the sake of travelling. The scenery is so endlessly stunning that it never feels like a waste of time that you're not really doing much in the way of skiing. That said, at some point the week before the trip, I threw my hand up and said to myself that I should just leave it to fate and try to enjoy exploring rather than planning everything out.