Sellaronda, Easter Week

A snowHead

My son and I visited the Sellaronda (Dolomiti Superski) last week. Many forum posts on this board were extremely helpful to me as I planned our trip, so I wanted to give something back.

We are Americans who had never skied outside of North America. Although I had researched the trip extensively, I hadn't quite appreciated the contrast between North American and European skiing. I thought I'd briefly describe some of the differences, as we saw them.

Whistler-Blackcomb is the largest ski area in North America. We were there two years ago. According to one pretty reasonable list, it is merely the 33rd largest in the world. The Sellaronda is fourth. So we were skiing in an area way beyond the scale of anything we had ever seen.

(Measuring the size of a ski area is not a trivial matter, as there is no universally accepted measurement. The aforementioned list considers contiguously lift-linked terrain. I take it that they are including not just the lifts on the Sellaronda itself, but everything reachable from the central core without having to take a bus or taxi. But they are not including the much larger Dolomiti Superski, which includes more than double the amount of terrain skiable on one pass, but not all of it continuously connected by pistes and/or lifts.)

At a North American resort, you typically spend all day going up and down, and up and down, from either one base area, or perhaps a few base areas that are reasonably close to one another. At a resort the size of the Sellaronda, you travel from one town to the next, across long distances that would cost €50 to 75 if you had to take a taxi.

At North American ski areas, usually the whole resort is under the control of one operator, so there is a homogeneous feel to the place, sometimes a bit like Disneyland. Here, the hotels and most of the on-piste restaurants are independently owned and operated. The landscape is dotted with cute little Italian trattorias and pizzerias, good enough that I'd probably visit them regularly if they were in my neighborhood. We also visited the region's three Michelin-starred restaurants (La Siriola, La Stüa de Michil, and St. Humbertus), but for the purposes of this discussion, I'll skip the gastronomical review.

The lift facilities are generally newer and better than in North America. Almost all lifts have timing gates, and most have conveyor belts. Many of the newer high-speed lifts have bubbles. All of these features are rather uncommon in North America. Europe also has a fondness for surface lifts, which dot the landscape. Many of them seem to be fairly new. I cannot recall the last time a new surface lift was installed in North America, but it certainly does not happen very often. Most ski operators here consider them undesirable.

The Sellaronda, and the larger Dolomiti Superski of which it's a part, consists of a large number (I am not quite sure how many) of formerly separate areas. Skiers purchase a pass for one of the constituent areas alone, or for the whole Dolomiti Superski. There is also, I gather, the option to put money on a card, and "pay by the drink" every time you use a lift. A small surface lift might charge €1.50, while a major gondola might charge €8. I don't know of any ski area in North America that offers this option. Every lift has an automated scanner, which detects a smart card in your left jacket pocket. In North America, most ski areas have manual scanning, and to save on labor costs, mid-mountain lifts (those you could not have reached without taking another lift) don't scan at all.

So that's just an overview of what seemed different to us.

I had worried about booking a trip so late in the season, but the lifts and slopes were almost 100 percent open, and there was tons of snow. We actually had powder days in Arabba (where we stayed) on our first and last day there. However, temperatures were above freezing most of the time, and at lower elevations the snow turned to cream cheese by mid-day. Most of the mapped pistes seem to be groomed daily. This is another contrast from North America, where ski areas usually have pistes that are groomed less often than that, or perhaps not at all.

Certainly, one advantage of taking the trip so late in the season, is that crowds were close to non-existent. I don't think we ever waited more than 60 seconds for a lift, and most of the time we just skied on (or walked on) with no line at all. We generally had a chair or gondola cabin to ourselves, and at times (in some of the more remote areas) there was not a single human in sight.

On the Sellaronda itself, the signage is extremely good. We took both the green (anti-clockwise) and orange (clockwise) routes, and there were only a couple of times when we were puzzled about where to go next. On other trips, one could get into trouble. In particular, sometimes a perfectly normal-looking piste dead-ends in the middle of a village, with the nearest uphill service a lengthy walk to the opposite end of town. But most of the time, the signage is reasonably clear, as long as you know the approximate sequence of major villages on the way to your destination.

Most North American resorts use a four-tiered ranking system, progressing (easiest to hardest) through green circle, blue square, black diamond, and double-diamond. The European system uses just three colors (blue, red, black). I don't know if the Sellaronda is typical, but I'd say their harder blue trails (supposedly beginner level) would be rated intermediate in N.A., and their harder red trails (intermediate) would be rated expert level. The Sellaronda itself is supposed to be within the compass of confident intermediates, and that is largely true, though there are a couple of spots in either direction that can be difficult, depending on the conditions.

The official maps are quite poor: at most points where pistes and lift lines meet, you can't even tell which way is up. Dolomiti Superski provides a smartphone app that can plan your route, but the numbering of the lifts on that app doesn't match the numbering on their printed map or posted on the lifts themselves.

Arabba turned out to be a pretty good place to stay. Obviously, it is one of the access points to the Sellaronda itself. It is also well located for two of the must-see excursions in this region, the Marmolada glacier and the Lagazuoi cable car to the Armentarola piste, which ends in a horse-drawn drag lift. Of course, any place you stay involves trade-offs. There are abundant slopes in the Val Gardena - Alpe di Siusi area (at the opposite corner of the Sellaronda) that we never came close to, simply because we couldn't get there and back on the same day. (A planned trip to Ortisei got only as far as S. Cristina, due to a number of wrong turns we took along the way.)

It was a challenge to find the right place to stay. Most hotels catering to skiers wil claim to be hard by the lifts, but it is not so easy to figure out how close they really are. Maps that show the hotels don't show the lifts, and vice versa. Our hotel (the Genziana in Arabba) turned out to be about a 10-minute walk of several blocks uphill to the lifts. It didn't kill us, but if I'd known that, I probably would have looked for something a bit closer. Travel and ski sites advised that Arabba is light on après-ski entertainment, and that is true, but the restaurants in town, all unfancy, are nevertheless pretty good.

Overall, it was a wonderful trip. The next time I ski in North America, it's going to be quite a letdown.

A snowHead

Nice report and interesting to see the comparison with North American skiing.

Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?

oakapple, Thanks for report. Glad you liked it.

I don't think there are many new surface lifts installed in Alpes nowadays, if any at all.
Maybe with the exception of glacier areas and on the bottom for learners.
There are still many of the old ones which will take time to replace. I guess some of them might stay for longer as they serve less popular or difficult runs and are not economical to replace.
We have visited 10-15 areas in the last few years and never had to use a surface lift.
(although it sometimes means you have to give up a few runs in the resort).

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Don't think I can disagree with anything in that write up Smile

Interesting about the US skiing. Most big places in Alps have full smartcard / RFID passes on almost all lifts - I'd assumed US was the same.

Sella Ronda certainly does have 1 sign missing on the clockwise route at Piz Seteur. You get to the top of the chair, look around and there is no sign for the official route. But you will see one for the alternative route (go that way anyway, it's better). In fact half way up that chair, if you look behind you, you can see a sign on the (old?) official loop. Going that way does lead to a few small lifts/drags. There are also a couple of drag lifts in the San Cassiano sector (1 you probably never need, the other is handy after the horse tow).

Alpe di Suisi was a long, fast day out from Arabba. It is possible, but you really need to put the foot down to get there, and know the way. Think that was the day we hit 100km (inc. lifts).

Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.

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Regarding "platter" lifts, I probably didn't make clear enough just how uncomon these are in North America. Most ski areas I've visited have none of these at all, any more. Of the areas I've visited or investigated, the only ski area that has one is Killington in Vermont. That lift dates from 1958, and it duplicates terrain covered by two chairlifts. For the most part, they run it only on overflow days. The dozens of them I saw sprinkled across the Dolomites didn't look exactly new, but they certainly looked a lot newer than 1958. On one hill in S. Cristina, I think I saw three or four of them together. In the United States, no hill of that size would be considered viable without a chairlift. I didn't mind the drag lifts all (they bailed us out a couple of times); I had just never seen so many of them.

Yes, I think Piz Seteur on the clockwise route could have been the place where we missed the Sellaronda continuation sign, and had to backtrack. It was definitely in that general era (after the Passo Pordoi, but well before Selva). On the anti-clockwise route, the missing sign was in Selva, shortly after Dantercepies. To continue the route at that point, you had to ski in between two rows of houses, then take off your skis and walk across the street, and this was not quite apparent. After missing it twice, we had to ask.

Then you can post your own questions or snow reports...

Yep can be easy to miss the signage there too. Then you get to the funky crossing with the automated gates. Was funny when they put that in a few years back, when the crossing lights go red, the gates lock... but you'd see people trying to use thier lift pass to trigger them to open! Laughing

It used to be carnage before.

Route out to Marmolada has one sign that *everyone* misses (yep - I'm guilty of that one too!). They go flying past the top of the drag lift, and only realise half way along that they made a mistake. That sign is really really obvious too!

After all it is free

hammerite, yup Smile

Made that mistake once, even after knowing about the really obvious sign that says Arabba left / Marmolada right. So another drag lift that you never need... except when you've fubared Wink

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andy, wouldn't be so bad if the drag wasn't cordoned off, you could pick your way across the lift line to the chair. It's not like that drag is particularly busy.

snowHeads are a friendly bunch.

hammerite, we did fence hop once. Not worth the effort. Much easier to take a trip on that drag, and maybe bail half way up if you're in a race to get back to Arabba. Most people on it are those that can't see that really obvious sign, or total beginners.

Help!!

Sellaronda, Easter Week

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