On Tuesday the 19th I left for my final
opportunity to ski the Italian Alps before our move back to the States on
December 7th. I suppose I
could regale you with the horrors I encountered using the Italian train system Trenitalia, but it’s off topic and in
the end just proved to be a distraction. Let’s just say that it took 5 trains, 2
buses, a subway, and 11 hours to return to that place where I could again ski
under the Matterhorn.
Cervinia hadn’t been my first choice for my final run at the Italian Alps; having previously skied there in March I had hoped to explore the western edge of the Dolomiti near Bolzano. Unfortunately, the snow has been late to the Alps this year and the slopes around Bolzano were dry
and barren. The “big” Alps of northwestern
Italy have a reputation for early snow; I guessed that the town of Cervinia,
close to the eastern border of France and adjacent to the southwest border of
Switzerland, would be my best bet for skiing before Thanksgiving.
I guessed right.
I guessed right.
They had been getting occasional snow squalls for a couple
of weeks, enough to open a small part of the mountain. Then the day before I traveled they got a
foot of snow, and were slammed with another foot the day I arrived. It snowed steadily most of the time that I
was there. Game on.
On Wednesday I grabbed my rental skis and poles and
trudged the 15 minutes up to the Plan Maison tram. The lower Cretaz lift, like the lower part of
the mountain, was still not open for operations yet, but the snow was good from
mid-mountain starting point at Plan Maison to the summit at Plateau Rosa, and that was what made the trip worth it.
The
visibility was limited due to the continual snowfall, and due to patches of fog
at the higher altitudes; still the snow was fresh, dry, and fast. I kept riding
the series of linked chairs up from mid-mountain, getting off wherever
visibility seemed best before charging back down. By afternoon I skied myself into a state of
exhaustion, or rather, oxygen deprivation.
Plan Maison starts at 8,300 feet above sea level and goes up from there, up to
11,300 feet at Plateau Rosa. Because of
my asthma I normally plan my ski runs to end below 7,500 feet, so I can
re-oxygenize on the way back up, however, because the lower half of the mountain was not open yet due to the early season, that was not an option here.
Thursday morning it was still snowing hard when I caught
the tram back up the mountain. The snow
was dry and fluffy, but the heavy snowfall was mixed with fog and the
visibility had dropped from limited to almost zero. Click the link to see the video on snow fall: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LIr_rr83LE It was slow going, certainly well off my normal pace, but
it simply made for a different kind of adventure. At noon I rode the tram back down to town to
catch my breath and take an extended lunch before heading back up to finish out
the day.
My original plans had been to ski a few hours Friday
morning before catching the afternoon bus to the train station, but given the complete
chaos of the Trenitalia clown rodeo, I figured it was a safer bet to leave
first thing in the morning and catch an earliest available train. Sadly, I was right; it took almost as long
and almost as many trains to get to get home as it did to get to Cervinia. It cost me a morning of skiing, but at least
I didn’t get kicked off a train at a closed, abandoned train station in the
middle of the night. My return to
Cervinia had been different than I had anticipated, but I was grateful for a
final opportunity to ski the Alps once more before leaving Italy.
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