Fab skiing in the Sella Ronda

17th December 2015, by Dave Watts

With no natural snow this season, the area still offers superb skiing on hundreds of km of man-made snow on pistes like this

Despite having no new snow this season and bare mountainsides everywhere, the main pistes were open and in great condition from top to bottom and we had lots of fun on excellent snow. That was due to the area’s fabulous snowmaking system, which I rate as the best in the world – a further feature on that will follow but for now suffice to say that of the 1200km of pistes covered by the Dolomiti Superski lift pass, over 500km were open and in excellent condition.

The piste skiing was as good or better than you could expect with plentiful natural snow. Two of the signature black runs were closed – not because of lack of snow but because they were being prepared for the World Cup races being staged there this coming weekend. The other main runs were in great condition and we enjoyed fabulous, high-speed cruises on runs all the way round the Sella Ronda circuit (which we completed in less than three hours on Tuesday because of the lack of crowds on the pistes and absence of lift queues).

My personal favourite runs were the red next to the World Cup GS run down to La Villa, the red down from the high point of Porta Vescovo above Arabba down to Pont de Vaux and the black down from Ciampinoi (the start point for this weekend’s Val Gardena World Cup downhill) to Selva. All were covered in lovely, firm, man-made snow and were ideal for high-speed carving.

In this early season when many resorts of similar height (most of the skiing is between 1500m and 2000m) are struggling, the Sella Ronda area is offering superb piste skiing.

I stayed two nights at each of two 4-star hotels featured by Crystal Ski: the Sporthotel Panorama a few metres from a chair lift and piste in Corvara (from £1,083 for a week in mid-March) and the Sporthotel Gran Baita in Selva with a huge indoor-outdoor pool (from £930 for a week in mid-March). Both hotels have saunas and steam rooms as well as pools and prices include flights, transfers and half-board.

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