Cervinia weekends - first turns of the season
I’ve just had the pleasure of back-to-back weekend trips snowboarding in Cervinia.
Cervinia shares a ski area with Zermatt, which has a glacier that’s open for skiing all year round, so you’re guaranteed some snow even early season. Fortunately early season this year is of epic proportions in terms of snow right across the Alps. Austria lead the way a month ago, but Switzerland, Italy and France have caught up.
Day one and two we spent primarily in Zermatt. I’ve done this trip a few times before, but this was the first time I made it all the way from Cervinia over to the Riffelberg area. Managed to find some untracked off-piste pow, whilst the piste was generally in great form. The visibility was great too.
Bit of a downer when one of our group dislocated his shoulder and had to be taken to a local hospital by helicopter. Never seen anyone in so much pain. The methodone and ketamine administered by mountain rescue seemed to help ease it somewhat.
By the evening of day two it started dumping… big! And that was just at resort level. Up the hill it was chucking it down. It carried on snowing throughout the night, until we left the following evening and beyond. That made for some serious powder on day three, but unfortunately very bad visibility. The high wind also meant that several lifts didn’t open, including the cross over into Zermatt.
None the less, I got in a few runs in Cervinia before retiring for the weekend safe in the knowledge that I’d be back on the slopes in 5 days with another group of friends.
When we arrived back in Cervinia on Friday night, snow was falling, and the village had clearly been coated for some time. Definitely in for a treat. On Saturday morning I bought a 2 day pass for Cervinia, determined to get to know this side of the mountain and ride runs that had never been open when we’d been here early season before.
Day four started fiercely, with strong winds and a bit more snow, though by 11ish it had cleared and clear blue skies took over. Some great runs were taken in, and I felt great on the snowboard charging around, jumping off anything going. A nice little mogul run down to resort level was the highlight for me.
Day five was forecast to be very windy, so expectations weren’t too high. It had been snowing all night however, and it was still snowing come the morning. It turned out the wind wasn’t too bad, and the pow was epic, but the visibility was bad. Spent the morning pretty much doing resort runs, before heading higher up the hill in the afternoon.
The off piste probably had the best powder I’ve ever ridden… it was that good. With a couple of the lads who had done the run earlier in the day, we ducked under the ropes at the top of the 2 seater chair and floated surf style back down to what was thought to be the piste.
“Wow, this is the deepest powder I’ve ever ridden on piste†someone said. Then the penny dropped. There were no piste markers in sight. In fact, we couldn’t see much but the white of the snow and the white of the, errr, white-out!
We thought we’d press on a bit to see if we could see anything recognizable, or any sign of civilization. No joy, so on til the next ridge. It was well gone 15:30 by this point and with the visibility no better, we questioned whether to turn around and hike back up, estimating 1.5 to 2 hours to get back to guaranteed piste. Other options were to head to an abandoned chair-lift hut and either tuck in for the night or raise the alarm by mobile phone for someone to come pick us up, or carry on forwards.
There was a track that looked like it had been layed by a skier within the last few days at some point, so we took the decision to carry on for another 10 minutes and reassess.
By this time, we’d run out of easily ridable snow and it was getting tiring strapping in, riding through waste deep pow and falling over, unstrapping, getting to your feet and repeating the process, so we’d taken to walking along the skiers faint tracks.
In the distance I saw something black moving left and right against the pitch white view. One of my mates reckoned it was a chair lift. As we drew closer we realized it was a pylon with chairs going passed. Happy days. At least we could follow the chair and know we’d get back to safety. As we drew closer still, we saw another piste with skiers on it, and recognized that part of the mountain.
Eventually we emerged back onto a run that went back down to resort level. We all immediately dropped to the floor and laid down for 10 minutes, counting our lucky stars.
Quite a few lessons learnt there from our lucky escape…
- Better to turn back as soon as you know you’ve gone wrong rather than pressing on blindly.
- When going off piste, check the route yourself before veering too far from the beaten track – don’t trust your mates blindly!
There’s an article in the latest SnowboardUK Magazine with another 6 or 7 tips – well worth reading. Stuff like bringing proper avalanche equipment (a fair risk of a slide with all that fresh snow), plan your route, start early… We flouted them all pretty much, and won’t be doing so again.
So… pretty stupid, but lessons learnt. We did 2 more runs, after hooking up with a few of the others from of our group of 17. Some of the others had found a good sized ledge for jumping off so we dragged our tired selves over that and headed for home.
Day 6 was similar in terms of the quality of powder, with marginly better visibility. We decided to take the lifts all the way up to Zermatt and ride all the way down the moutain back down to Cervinia resort level. We took two different routes. Firstly, turning right at the top of the Plateau Rosá lift, and taking the mostly red runs down to the main ticket office area in Cervinia via Laghi Cime Blanche. Quick bite to eat up at Plan Maison, then up to Zermatt again, this time riding left over to the link to Cervinia via short black before a series of blues and reds all the way down to the back of our hotel.
Having been back to Cervinia twice in the last 10 days and 3 years running at this time of year, clearly I’m a fan of the resort. Its got a great chilled out vibe in the village, with one of the most even mixes of skiers and snowboarders I’ve seen anywhere. The Zermatt link opens up so much more too.
On the down side, there aren’t many challenging runs, with blues and reds predominant. This weekend we were spoilt with great powder, but in previous years it was limited, packed piste.
I’m sure I’ll be back next year though.
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