It was very deep and fluffy XD Photo by Jernej Smole

Since I spend most of Saturday sleeping off and cleaning my cave(yes I do that every other month or so :P), and Žiga posted a nice bluebird powder pic from Vogel, Sunday ment action.

My original plan was to ring up a few powder buddies and go to Vogel. It was still dumping like there was no tommorow and the temperature was still stable so in the the late evening, we decited to instead head for the woods of Travisio aka Višarje on the Slovenia-Italy border since the weather prediction was a cloudy snowstorm. Miha was already there so we just joined up. Also Smole, who was with us at the jibbrothers invitational came all the way from Maribor to ride with us. 

But before going anywhere at 6 am I had to free my car from a ton of snow. That, and the fact that my road in the middle of Ljubljana was NOT CLEARD or anything like that (Thnx JPL for your snowcompetence…) and that the celaning dozer managed to block the whole road with a ton of snow from the mainroad didn`t help much. Hell I had to put on the snowchains just to make it like 100m to the main road. Took me about an hour !!! 

The point of orientation.. the fun was left or right XD Photo by Jernej Smole

So after a long ride on a badly cleaned roads we arrived at Traviso. And boy were we in for a nice surprise. There was just so much snow. We kept riding and riding and it was dumping and dumping. Check it out XD: 

It was still dumping even as we were departing XD Photo by Jernej Smole

The woods there are so superdense at the middle that it requires a ton of good skill to move without hugging trees. Also one thing that was abundand was sluff. Oh yes my belowed sluff. The 50 cm on top of the old curst were more or less stable but still as the day progressed and the the temperature rose at an unbelivable pace the snow started to become more heavy and one could see the old crust underneth was starting to show trough. Traviso is an interesting place to ride. Quite harsh and inhospitable dense woods with a not all to nice deforestation in the middle. My tip is to got here only when there is a ton of snow.. otherwise it might get a little nasty.

Not a lot of space ! Photo by Jernej Smole

Also another aspect that one needs to consider is Italys idiotic policy towards freeride. Namely it is forbidden. Exception are a few so called freeride zones. Most resorts don`t have them. On my recent work related mission to Austria a representative of the snowmachine maker Demaclenko, who is also with the italian alpine rescue told me that the problem is the burocracy. Unlike in Austria where you can go everywhere and are resposible for your own actions in Italy the responsibility is with the resort operator. Since the resort can then be sued for massive damadges the operators make sure that the access to powder is as hard as possible. Also the snow partolers are police officers that will fine you with around 400 EUR if they catch you. We were lucky that day but on the other side of the mountain a few of others were not …

At the other side of the resort one of our friends was involuntarily taken in by the police because he wanted to help a dude that trigged an avalanche and got buried. That person apparently didn`t even have any safety gear… Also there was some murky reporting on the subject by the oh so objective Slovenian and Italian media whose factchecking skills stop at the size of the local gondola. Suffice to say if 400 people would fit into a cabin of a 8 person Einseilumlaufbahn I bet Dopplmayr or Leitner would pay a shitload of cash for that Patent… So yeah, that happens when foxnews Slovenia employs students for 5 bucks an hour instead of journalists… sensationalism bullshit at its best. Luckly no one was injured in the incident.

At the bottom Višarje/Travisio Photo by Jernej Smole