Dolomiti, Italy - Oct 4 - 9

October 4 to 9 we flew in the Dolomite Mountains (Italian Alps). We went with Blue Sky Flugschule from Sillian, Austria. IMO money well spent, since lodging, food (lots of it, including delicious 5 course Tyrolean dinners), shuttles and site briefings were all taken care of.

In summer the Dolomites are a bit too full on but this time of year the flying is still good and the weather usually better than elsewhere in the Alps. The Dolomites are renowned for the dramatic limestone mountains, spires and walls. There are paved roads up to 2200m and lots of ski lifts, some going to over 3000m. The valley bottoms are around 1400m with lots of large fields available to land in. We flew from several launches, including Col Rodella and Belvedere in the Fassa Valley, with the impressive backdrop of the Sella Group, Marmolada and Langkofel.

The weather only let us fly four of the six days but we still managed to do 10 flights. I had 7 hours airtime, Pete had 11 hrs. He spent lots of time flying around the Langkofel with its dramatic 400m high vertical walls and spires. Unfortunately the cloud base was right around the top of the cliffs which made it hard to go any further (Pete's best flight). Interesting note - during our first day at Col Rodella there were 2 reserve tosses and during the second day 3 paraglider crashes, 2 of them lead to severe injuries requiring heli rescues (one rotored in and the other did a 360 that intersected the cliff). Although the air wasn’t particularly rough where we flew, care must be taken not to blunder into rotor from strong valley winds or convergence points of valleys (this can be a problem at Col Rodella launch – see picture of a dusty having its way with 4 wings on the SE launch).

We had hoped to get to fly over the Marmolada (one of the turn point in the X-Alps). It turned out that Max Fanderl (of X-alp fame) and 4 other pilots from Calgary had gone with Blue Sky the previous week. Max had had to climb the Marmolada on foot during the X-alps but managed to fly over this time.

There were lots of pilots flying here. Most of the time the lift was good enough to stay up but not good enough to get away easily. This made for some very busy air space complicated by the fact that a few pilots seemed to have forgotten the air rules. When it got to be too much we headed to some alternate launches to escape the crowds. One in particular stood out – Belvedere, right across from the Marmolada. The launch was a grassy knoll that rolled off into a steep cliff. A frontal would likely have been fatal. Quite focusing!

This was our first flying trip in Europe. It was interesting to see that the majority of pilots were flying DHV1-2 even with 10+ years of experience. The most popular gliders were the Swing Mistral, the Nova Mentor and the Sky Atis.

Pictures here (will add some to blog soon)