Chasing Powder in the Alps (Part 3): Trees of Limone Piemonte
After chasing powder from Austria to Switzerland, there was a now a big Retour d'Est storm forecasted to hit the far southern Alps in the Piemonte region of western Italy. This was great news, particularly because the mountains there already had a solid snowpack from an earlier Retour d'Est in December. So, we drove over the mountains from Switzerland into Italy and made a beeline to Limone Piemonte, a village and ski area in the farthest southern tip of the Alps just north of the Mediterranean Sea.
We spent five days skiing/snowboarding there (including one day at nearby Mondole Ski) – the first four days in a whiteout snowstorm. With a constant dense fog during the storm it was nearly impossible to see anything at all above tree line, so it's a good thing that Limone Piemonte is plump full of fantastic forests to ride through! And even better that I seemed to be one of the only ones doing it, riding powdery tree lines for days in solitude.
A unusual thing about the mountains in this southern Piemonte region is that the forests are mostly deciduous broadleaf trees. This was a novelty for me to ride powder in these deciduous forests, since I'm used to the conifer forests of the western US (or most of the rest of the Alps, for that matter). I thought the trees were also quite photogenic when plastered with snow!
With so much forested terrain, the Limone Piemonte ski area offers loads of snow stashes for a powderhound like me to sniff out during a multi-day storm like this. Just when I thought I'd found the mother lode of untracked tree lines, I'd find an even better area later on!
One of the many reasons I love snowboarding so much (aside from just being really fun), is that it's so conducive to a flow state of mind, when I'm totally focused and absorbed in the activity of the moment. Riding tree lines in particular can unlock a special form of flow where my eyes are scanning the forest way ahead of where I'm actually riding and my legs are responding directly to my eyes without any conscious decision-making. When I snap into this forward-scanning flow state, I'm able to see cleaner lines through the trees, and my riding through the forest becomes remarkably faster and smoother.
After three days of storm riding at Limone Piemonte, I pretty well tracked up most of the forests I could reasonably ride by myself. On our last day here, the storm broke and with our first clear skies we could finally see the mountains all around, as well as all the open bowls and faces that I couldn't see and didn't dare enter during the whiteout. I'm glad we got to see the lay of the land before we left, but even if we hadn't I'd still be content with my memories of riding amongst all those foggy, powdery trees.
