Me and my son Daniel will be on a ski trip at Val Gardena starting from Saturday 4th February 2023 for a week. We are staying at hotel Antares in Selva (Wolkenstein in Gröden). We bought an all-inclusive package from STS-Alpresor (STS-Alppimatkat) that includes the flights, bus transport from/to airport, accomodation in 4 star hotel Antares, half-board (breakfast and 4-course dinner) and 6 day ski pass to Dolomiti Superski. I did a similar trip last year in 2022 to the same place just when the travel restrictions of the Covid pandemic were starting to be lifted.
I had to do lot of preparations for this ski trip this year, as I had to buy new skis, and it was time to update also the ski wear as well. I also reviewed my ski routes from the previous year’s trip and did a bit of planning in advance. I have written separate articles of these preparations:
- New skis: SALOMON X S/RACE RUSH GS
- New ski wear: Montec shells, and merino wool base layer
- Ski routes for the Dolomites
Weather forecast
The winter has been a little odd this season, but now on Friday 2023-02-03 the weather forecasts from many services look really good. The snow reports show there’s 75 cm of snow on upper slopes, 60 cm lower. All Val Gardena lifts (78) and 179 km out of 181 km slopes are open. Sella Ronda has been open all days past few weeks.
The forecast from Foreca is consistent with all other services and the following figure sums it up: almost all ski days (Sun-Fri) will be sunny with snow staying fresh. Some new snow coming on preceding days. The forecast is for the Sëlva village at 1563 m, but skiing will be at higher altitude with much more snow and a bit colder.
I often check weather forecasts from Norwegian yr.no as their forecasts have proven to be very reliable. For Sëlva yr.no gives:
For planning the Sella Ronda tours it is important to check wind at 2000 and 3000 meters, because strong high altitude wind will close the upper lifts over the passes and the Ronda will be closed, and Windy is really handy for that. Wind forecasts over the Sella Group look really good.
There is also the Provincial mountain weather service.
So on next Sunday I will hopefully be ripping the black slopes down from Ciampinoi with a new pair of skis.
Maps
The most traditional way to navigate in big resorts of the Alps is to use so called “panorama maps”, which try to present the lifts and slopes on an artistically drawn bird-eye view of the mountains and valleys. The Dolomiti Superski super-area is so large that this format just barely works for each sub-area separately. You can get pocketable foldable paper prints for these, and I have downloaded PDF versions of them here for the 4 areas that are relevant to doing Sella Ronda tours:
However, these panorama maps are actually difficult to use for navigation due to these areas being so large. In smaller resorts they work better. Another possibility is to use interactive map, a web-desktop version for pre-planning or a smartphone version embedded to the Dolomiti Superski app on the slopes.
Then there is also the FATMAP:
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