 Poster: A snowHead
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After such a great trip to Macedonia last month and with Western Europe still hurting for snow I headed back to the Balkans.
TR: Western Balkans Part I - Popova Shapka, Macedonia (January 2011)
http://snowheads.com/ski-forum/viewtopic.php?t=102070
DAY 1 : THURSDAY 24 FEBRUARY 2011
Return train travel from Aberdare to London Heathrow - 50 euros
Return Air Austria flight from Heathrow to Skopje, Macedonia - 208 euros
Got in to Skopje just before midnight.
DAY 2 : FRIDAY 25 FEBRUARY 2011
Rented an Opel Astra from SIXT at the airport - 180 euros for 8 days rental with unlimited mileage.
Took about 20 mins to sort out and then followed the guy to the road to Pristina, Kosovo and I was on my way.
No problem with border and police checkpoint.
Finally found the Brezovica turnoff (it's Prizrhen, and then right at the fork), and 3 or so hours after touching down in Skopje I was in Brezovica town.
Took the mountain road up to the ski area but didn't get far before the tyres were spinning. The snow was coming down nicely.
Had to reverse back to a flat area, tried to put the chains on but it was dumping with snow and cold as hell.
So I gave up, slept in the car, and followed the plough up the access road at 7am
http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2011/jan/04/balkans-skiing-snowboarding-resorts
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/world/europe/14iht-kosovo.4.8341993.html?_r=2&
http://www.njeri.net/snownjeri.php
I wandered around the village and checked in to the Woodland Hotel at 8am
70 euro B&B (charge by the room). Pricey, but it was modern, spacious, and warm. Very welcoming and a good vibe in the bar and restaurant.
http://woodlandhotel-ks.com/about_us.php
Quick shower, breakfast, and I was out for first lift.
They finally started running the two man lift by the Woodland Hotel at 10ish.
12 euros a day and you pay at the liftline. IN CASH
The chair takes you to the highest lift accessed point but you can hike higher and further around to hit a massive amount of terrain on the backside.
It all funnels back around to the frontside of the area.
Windblown powder in the alpine. Boot top to knee deep in the trees.
Sunny with an inversion in the valley.
Pizza dinner at Woodland. Excellent.
DAY 3 : SATURDAY 26 FEBRUARY 2011
Cloudy and snowy. Skied off the back all day. Some nice boot top powder.
Skied with 2 guys up from Pristina for the weekend and had lunch with them.
DAY 4 : SUNDAY 27 FEBRUARY 2011
Hiked Brezovica early, then got out of there before the Sunday crowd.
Great terrain above the lifts.
The old lift map with the closed terrain off the back
Brezovica Stores
Got the snowmobile from Woodland back to the car with all my stuff.
Took me 15 mins to get past the first barrier up the mountain. So much traffic.
Glorious day for the drive from Brezovica to Zabljak, Montenegro. 8 hr drive all told.
Brezovica, Prizrhen, Peja, Pec, border crossing, Rojare, Zabljak.
Road out of Brezovica was snow covered. Ski hill on the pass. Amazing touring potential.
10 euros tax to get in to Montenegro.
Tar Canyon was very impressive. Some of the biggest trees I've ever seen. Some form of pine/fir/spruce but also looked like cedar and monkey puzzle.
Tried to find Hotel Jezra in Zabljak, no luck. Had a look at the resort and then found Ski Hotel Zabljak on the road coming in.
View from the Hotel
60 euro Half Board. Massive room. Brand new. Would be 80 euro HB for room with 2 people. Bargain.
Veal Soup
Schnitzel with bacon and cheese, chips
Chocolate gateaux
Couple of glasses of Vranec
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
You need to Login to know who's really who.
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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Great stuff, as ever Mike Pow! Some great pics too.
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You'll need to Register first of course.
You'll need to Register first of course.
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Thanks mountainaddict
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Very good article on Kosovo in September 2013 issue of Skiing magazine
Seems like Brezovica isn't running anymore, but there is a cheap cat operation
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Up & Down (& Up Again) in Kosovo
Skiing is not exactly what Kosovo is known for. But in this tiny new country, the sport might just help heal some war wounds. Or, at the very least, provide employment for one good snowcat mechanic.
WORDS BY Tim Neville
PHOTOGRAPHY BY Dan and Janine Patitucci
Some call me Timsky.
“Timsky!” shouts Dren Menda, eyes flashing under ski goggles pushed onto his brow. He’s a handsome guy, a professional hairdresser in a limegreen jacket and brown ski pants. We’re in the back of a snowcat—or a ratrak, as they say here—and a half a dozen cruets clank around on the floor. Dren hands me one, a small glass vase filled with clear brandy.
“Rakia?” he says over the noise. “Drink?”
For the past 25 minutes the Pisten Bully 170 D has been wheezing its way up a very steep slope. The driver, a Balkan guy with a cigarette, goads the machine onward until the engine stalls. He backs down, guns it upward again, over and over. Each time we gain a few dozen feet. The clanking noises coming from within make me nervous.
“Ratrak good!” Dren assures me, and I take a slug.
Ten skiers in a can—eight Albanians, one Serb, and me. Albanians and Serbs generally don’t get along, but everyone is amped. Two feet of new snow sits atop a base that’s hardly been skied all winter, and we have a resort’s worth of untracked runs from which to choose. This is Brezovica, one of the premier resorts of old Yugoslavia, and no one else is around.
Maybe that’s not so surprising. To be more specific: Brezovica (BRAYzo-VEE-tsa) is in Kosovo, and wasn’t there a war in Kosovo? There was, but that was back when Clinton was president. Kosovo today is a completely different place—Europe’s newest country, a five-year-old, Connecticut-size diamond landlocked between Albania, Montenegro, Serbia, and Macedonia in what was once Yugoslavia. Most of Kosovo’s landscape tends to roll more than buck, with gentle floodplains and fruit orchards, but look around its fringes and you’ll find some very Alpine terrain.
The Bjeshkëte Namuna, a.k.a. the Albanian Alps, rise like 8,000-foot-high hackles over massive valleys along the Montenegrin border. The second tallest summit in all of the greater Dinaric Alps, 8,714-foot Djeravica, looms on the border with Albania to the west. Here at Brezovica in the south, the Sharr Mountains guard the border with Macedonia like thick elbows in a 96,000-acre national park. The ski area itself stands 8,200 feet high. Last year, storms dropped 228 inches of snow on it. North-facing aspect, 2,600 vertical feet, 10 lifts—it’s all here.
Or it was. This winter, for the first time since they began to operate in 1979, the lifts won’t run. No one knows if they’ll run next winter either.
Management hasn’t paid the power bill.
But wait. This is Kosovo, and $9 pressed into the hand of a smoking Balkan guy gets you a ride to the top in his entrepreneurial death ’trak. After nearly an hour of lurching back and forth, the ratrak at last grinds to a halt. I fist the fog from the window and see we’re 50 feet below the top lift station. I suggest we just get out now and go, but everyone looks at me like I’m crazy. No way, says The Vibe. We’ve come this far.
Brezovica’s vertical (feet) 2,600
Brezovica’s (dormant) lifts 10
Brezovica’s unpaid power bill (U.S. dollars) 330,000
Snow flies off the tank treads, and I imagine parts are coming off too. I lock eyes with Dren, who begins to scream.
Suddenly there’s an awful clanging sound, and we rumble backward again. The motion feels different though, like we’re speeding up and shaking more. Snow flies off the tank treads, and I imagine parts are flying off too. I lock eyes with Dren, who begins to scream.
“Ratrak kaput! Ratrak kaput!”
Sweet Jesus. I knew it.
I brace against the armrests, wishing I’d kept my helmet on. But before I can figure out how to leap out, the shaking subsides. We drift to a stop at the very bottom of the run. The ratrak is not kaput after all.
“Bwahahaha!” Dren cackles. “You were scared, Timsky, so scared!”
Indeed. Everyone is still laughing as the driver whips the machine around, points its ass uphill, and floors it in reverse.
Everything was going poorly in Kosovo as a whole in 1998, when no one cared if you could ski there. At that time Kosovo was a Serbian province, home to a large ethnic-Albanian population and a small Serbian minority. When the Albanians, who are Muslims, tried to break away from Serbian rule, the better-armed Serbs began slaughtering them.
“We’ve seen innocent people taken from their homes, forced to kneel in the dirt, and sprayed with bullets,” President Clinton said in March of 1999. “This is not war in the traditional sense.”
NATO stepped in with 23,000 bombs and pounded the Serbs into a peace deal by June 1999. By then some 1.5 million Kosovar Albanians had been displaced—90 percent of the population—and thousands were dead. Many Serbs fled too, fearing retribution.
Today you could wander the cities of Kosovo, population 1.8 million, and miss a lot of the signs of the ugliness. To date, 103 of the United Nations’ 193 member states, including the United States, have recognized Kosovo’s independence, and billions of dollars in international aid have rebuilt it quickly. There are new skyscrapers and highways with “THANK YOU, USA!” murals painted on the overpasses. People drink, dance, flirt, and wear tight clothes. (It’s one of the most liberal Muslim communities in the world.) Peacekeepers remain, especially in Serb strongholds in the north. But most of Kosovo is safe and seemingly carefree. It’s just that a lot of the buildings look curiously new.
But I am not here to explore the cities. I am here to ski. And as far as I can tell, the mountain hamlets that dot Kosovo’s ski country haven’t ever changed. While hiking in Kosovo last fall, I learned that there are five ski resorts here, of which Brezovica is by far the best. But first I want to explore a town called Bogë in northwest Kosovo, which, I’ve heard, has a T-bar and some decent backcountry skiing.
My guide, Fatos Lajçi, a former Albanian guerrilla fighter now building backcountry huts in the Albanian Alps, fetches me and photographers Dan and Janine Patitucci from the Pristina airport. He’s 41, with a smoky shock of black frazzled hair, loose-fitting clothes, and a Land Cruiser. We pile in and drive off into an oddly orangish night. The plan is to ski at Bogë first and then spend a few days at his huts. I’ll visit Brezovica on my own at the end.
“We haven’t had so much snow,” Fatos says as we motor west along piebald fields. “Last year it was, like, two meters in town.”
The snowbanks gradually rise as we enter the Albanian Alps, and Bogë shimmers an ethereal blue in the moonlight as we arrive around midnight. We wake freezing the next day in a chalet that a friend of Fatos’s has built, so we dress quickly and ski down to the village center. A-frame huts with new tin roofs sparkle on the valley floor. Maybe 200 people live in Bogë—most of them cheesemakers, farmers, and shepherds, I presume.
With just three runs and maybe 600 vertical feet, Bogë is where you learn to ski—not come to ski—but it’s a difficult day to do either. A small crowd of skiers mills about, but few actually ride the T-bar, which rattles up a steep, icy skull of a hillside. A gangly boy sidesteps a short ways uphill and then explodes coming down. Two guys slide on garbage bags—right into a crowd. A snowmobiler motors around. By the end of the day someone will break a leg.
A single T-bar ride to the top costs one euro. For the day, it’s 10 euros. I cough up a coin and let the chaos fall away. The Albanian Alps rise behind me. At the top, I wave to a kid wearing a Go-Pro camera and then slide out along a rounded ridge to play in a six-turn meadow. It’s quaint, like a Pennsylvania hill set in the Valais.
About $5 of skiing later we retreat to the Rudi Pub at the base for beers and creamy peppers. A fox pelt hangs on the wall near a makeshift rental shop, and two young girls giggle at us from an adjacent table. Ylber “Rainbow” Rudi, Bogë’s ski instructor, pulls up a chair. He’s 53, with bushy eyebrows, and has been trying for years to put Bogë on the map. Even Google doesn’t show it.
“Skiing is my life,” Rainbow beams when I ask him how he ended up here. He was a ski instructor all over Yugoslavia and came to Bogë in 1992 to “build the future” (a ski school and a hotel). Serbs burned the future in the war, but Rainbow and his family rebuilt it in 2003. Now his own skiing seems to matter less than keeping Kosovo’s small slice of the sport alive.
“I love skiing, and I love the mountains,” Rainbow says. “When you love something, you want to keep it.”
Fatos has learned a lot about love and perseverance from this region, too. We speak about his time here as we trundle out of Bogë the next day on the start of a three-day backcountry ski trip into a valley deep in the Rugovë region. Fatos knows it well, having spent a lot of time in Pepaj, a mountain village near the Montenegrin border. From there we hope to climb and ski a 7,884-foot-high massif called Hajla. Fatos believes ours will be a first descent.
“You know, in 1984 the Winter Games came to Sarajevo and everyone all over Yugoslavia was interested in skiing,” he says as we bounce through icy ruts on a slick dirt road. “Man, I really wanted to do it too.”
But Fatos couldn’t buy the gear, much less find it in Pepaj, so he borrowed a horse, hauled two trees from the forest, and made his own skis with inner tubes for bindings and “Elan” stenciled across the top. (The Slovenian ski manufacturer is still beloved by the former Yugoslavian countries.)
“I could ski anything on those!” he laughs. “By the end of the winter they were completely bowed.”
No one lives in Pepaj in winter anymore, and the road is closed, so we park at a farmhouse in a onemosque village about 1,500 vertical feet downvalley. Our packs will be light because Fatos has built three huts near Hajla. In summer, his nonprofit, Environmentally Responsible Action, uses them for overnight youth programs on nature and conservation. In winter, Fatos sometimes just hangs out in them for weeks.
An elderly man with soft blue eyes and a flannel flat cap emerges from the farmhouse and kisses Fatos twice on the cheeks. He has orchards, an apiary, and a small guesthouse. Of course we can leave the Land Cruiser there.
“This man was very helpful during the war,” Fatos says, explaining how Osman Shala, 69, sheltered and fed Albanian fighters. Osman offers us coffee and slippers and shares a story about his own mock execution. Fatos’s brother, Besnik, was shot and killed defending Pepaj in April 1999, just weeks before the end of the war. He was 27. The village was destroyed.
“It was war; it was what you expected,” Fatos says. “For a while I wanted to burn all of Serbia but it’s over now. For me there is no more hate.”
It’s a remarkable thing to say in a place where hate is passed down like a family watch and feuds can last for centuries. Kosovo’s own issues go back to at least the 1300s. I get the feeling that the huts—this place—have helped Fatos heal.
The sun angles low as we skin through the forest toward Pepaj, which we reach after about an hour in a warm golden light. New hollow-brick homes cling to a sloping meadow where roughly 20 families farm in summer. I pause by a cemetery with a few graves bearing the red ensigns of the Kosovo Liberation Army. I assume one of them belongs to Besnik.
That night the wind squeezes through chinks in a hut Fatos has been building piecemeal since 2002, but I sleep well and the three-hour climb to his newest hut the next day goes by quickly. This hut is a home. It sits on the edge of a pine forest and looks like Davy Crockett’s Aspen retreat, with a rustic log-timber frame and lots of angled glass. Fatos has spent all summer building it with nothing but a chainsaw and a hammer. It has wood floors, two stories, sleeping rooms, and power. But there is still work to do. A lamp over the stove explodes when Fatos fires up the generator.
I pause by a cemetery with a few graves bearing the red ensigns of the Kosovo Liberation Army. I assume one of them belongs to Besnik.
“Sorry, guys!” he says, adding something about a stuck carburetor.
We stay up late by the fire, and the next morning Fatos is sound asleep. He doesn’t ski much these days anymore, so Dan, Janine, and I start the 1,500-foot climb up Hajla alone. We march past wind-flagged pines and set a long, diagonal track that switches back to a heavily corniced summit ridge. From the top we have 360-degree views into Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, and Serbia. Fatos eventually makes it up too, carrying a garbage bag for the slide down.
The snow is surprisingly soft, especially lower down. My edges sigh as they shave off a layer of corn, then hush into long, swooping carves. We eat sausages and bread and then hike up to a shoulder to watch the sunset. The temperature drops fast, and dark clouds congeal over the distant Sharr Mountains. After weeks of no snow, a storm is coming. It’s time to meet the Serbs.
The snow is falling hard a few days later when I arrive in the town of Strpce, a Christian Orthodox enclave near the Macedonian border in the south of Kosovo. Some of the war’s displaced Serbs now live here in dreary refugee flats. Brezovica proper stands about 2,800 vertical feet above Strpce and includes a couple of hotels and two rows of cozy restaurants and bars. Everything is set on the side of a very slick, steep hill. I want crampons to reach my hotel.
Igor introduces me to his wife, Draginja, and 20-year-old daughter, Tina, who later friends me on Facebook as She Wolf.
Igor Nikolèeviæ meets me inside a pizzeria he runs out of a wood and stone house his grandfather built on the mountain before the lifts came in. Igor wears a camouflage jacket and has a neatly trimmed goatee. He introduces me to his wife, Draginja, and 20-year-old daughter, Tina, who later friends me on Facebook as She Wolf. I spend hours talking with them over brandy and Serbian pancakes. They’re not the big bad Serbs NATO put down but supremely thoughtful people who built friendships outside of politics.
“Even during war you could still ski here,” Igor explains. I have heard that while much of the countryside smoldered, Brezovica was a pocket of calm where Albanians and Serbs got along, thanks in no small part to skiing. The anecdote seemed too tidy, too simplistic, but Igor firmly believes the sport helped spare the place. “What are you going to do—a Serb and an Albanian—sitting on a chairlift together for 10 minutes?” he asks. “You talk. ‘You like to ski? I like to ski.’ We could enjoy same thing together.”
Back in the heydays of the 1980s, Brezovica was a very hip place to be. The lifts all ran like new and in the evenings some of Belgrade’s best DJs would rock the discos with acid house. Elan reps wandered the dance floors giving away free skis. There were races and freestyle contests and in ’84 Brezovica served as a backup site for the Olympic downhill. Suspicions between Serbian and Albanian skiers grew as the war neared, but the lifts still ran even after the massacres began.
The war wrecked the economy, though, and by 2002 Brezovica was going downhill. Workers began pocketing lift-ticket fees. You could trade a jacket for a season pass. With no meaningful investments made, the place crumbled. By 2012 Brezovica had just one lift, barely running. Today, the power company has literally pulled the plug thanks to an outstanding $330,000 bill that the resort, a Serbian socially owned enterprise, has never paid.
“At first I thought, how am I going to pay my debts?” Igor says. “But I’m still working. Not as usual, but working.”
It’s true. We put our jackets back on, lower our goggles, and step outside into a scene that would make Warren Miller cry. Hundreds of people have come to ski at Brezovica, knowing very well there is no lift. They shoulder their gear and hike up short distances to make powdery turns.
Beginners do drills around cones while others cruise the bunny hill. Music blasts from a bar terrace.
“Lezgo!” Igor says, handing me my skis. We climb into the back of a snowcat with a crew of his Albanian friends, who are handing out these funny little bottles of booze.
“Is this machine safe?” I ask.
“Yes. I mean, yes,” Igor says. “But if we die I will be a hero for taking out so many Albanians.”
“Whatever, minority!” one of the Albanians jokes back. “We make you buy us sandwiches.”
As it happens, Timsky finds neither death nor sandwiches—only brandy and a whole lot of lurching back and forth. It turns out that going uphill backward works, and the ratrak roars to the tippy top in one miraculous metaphor. Kosovo’s path may never be easy, but my guess is it will get there one way or the other. For now I am not dead, and a long run stretches before us under shin-deep snow. A ghostly fog swirls around the motionless lifts. I’m told there’s a group working to revitalize Brezovica, but I’m not sure it matters here and now. We sort out the skis. Everyone has the fat, buoyant kind that tells me I’ve fallen in with the lifers.
Earlier Igor confided to me that he’s not sure what the future holds. Despite his actions, he is a Serb after all, and a lot of people in Kosovo can’t even talk to Serbs without wanting to kill them. “I really hope we can stay here,” he said.
Clicked in, goggles down, buddied up: No one wants to stick around now. There are limitless lines to pick but in the end they all funnel us back to the same tight spot between the rocks and the trees. The only thing that matters now is finding a fun way through.
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
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Another good read, thanks.
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| fabricem wrote: |
| Another good read, thanks. |
Cheers.
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snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
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And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
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My pleasure.
Montenegro, Kosovo and Macedonia are great ski destinations.
Highly recommended.
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FAQ
