| Ski the Ortler Traverse |
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Page 1 of 5 A group of American friends travels to Italy for some springtime T-shirt ski touring in the sunny Ortler Mountains. Then it begins to snow...and snow. 
 ACCESS A great allure of Italy’s Ortler Mountains is that they’re less trammeled than other areas of the Alps. The flip side: They’re harder to get to. Ski tourers usually begin either from the south and the ski village of Santa Caterina Valfurva, or from the north, through the ski village of Solda... Mid-April on the reputed sunny side of the Alps isn’t supposed to be like this. “Mama mia! Molto neve!” says the hutkeeper wearily while standing in the doorway of the rifugio and scowling at the 18 inches of snow that have appeared overnight. The new snow sits atop the week’s first two feet, and the hutkeeper’s incredulity says it all: Late spring in Italy’s Ortler-Cevedale Mountains is supposed to bring caressing sunshine, corn snow, and cold après-ski beers on the warm decks of some of the Alps’ plushest ski huts. Last night, in that age-old skiers’ attempt to “drink it blue,” our group sat in the honeyed glow of the rifugio’s pine-and-stone bar and tossed back too much of its inventory of lighter-fluid grappa. Now the verdict is shin-deep across the deck: Our boozy shamanism needs work.Mountain guides Larry Goldie and Jeff Ward head out to recon the morning. They return an hour later and report a world gone so milk-bottle white that they had to resort to the guide’s trick of whipping knotted cord forward from a ski pole to gauge whether the slope ahead leads up or down, or drops off a cliff. “You know it’s bad out when you’re fly-fishing,” quips Ward. The good news: “The stability is fairly good, and the snow is superlight,” reports Goldie, who has brought along his friends to experience the Ortler Traverse, some of Europe’s finest ski touring. “And it seems like it’s breaking up,” adds Scott Johnston, one of those friends, a neighbor of Goldie’s back in Washington State. That’s all everybody needs to hear. Buckles clatter. Avalanche beacons bleep. Skins are stretched across skis. It’s day five of the molto stormy week that hasn’t let this group of stout skiers run wild in a playground of a dozen peaks nearly scraping 12,000 feet. No way anyone’s gonna let this opportunity pass. Goldie leads through the blankness up to the crest of a whaleback ridge. There, we pause, and the guys make their wives groan with bad jokes while we wait for that eggshell whiteness to crack and reveal a ridgeline, a patch of valley floor, anything. When the slope finally materializes, we swoop through snow that bow-waves at knees, passing Great War stonework gun batteries and hopping over loops of barbed wire that reach up in forlorn hope of claiming a final casualty. Even when the powder turns to polenta, no one wants to stop, instead heading down, down until we run out of mountain at the valley floor. The sky cinches shut. The wind picks up, and warm snow starts, falling on shoulders with a slapping sound. But everybody’s smiling madly at each other, Goldie not the least. And why not? He has snuck in another great ski run for himself and his friends. And now? Now he has a date with a beer and some blueberry torta. |
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