Posts Tagged ‘pajares’

Pompeyo's nose

Liz was off running with her new running chums so I took advantage of Pompeyo’s offer to go skiing.

I’d already been to San Isidro and Fuentes de Invierno so we decided on Pajares (Valgrande-Pajares, to give it its full name). Pajares is the original Asturian ski resort (seems funny to call it a resort, in Spanish they’re called estaciones de ski, ski stations: resort seems a little grand). It’s bigger than Fuentes de Invierno, even has a brace of hotels/hostels. As we drove up there Pompeyo told me that the first time he went there was in 1986, when there was only one charlift (wooden slatted chairs) and a ton of button lifts.

It’s popular, on a good weekend it’ll be packed full of folk. Being Spanish, of course, they mainly arrive a little late so as we got there at 8:45am we had the pick of parking spaces. The lifts opened at 9 and there was a gaggle of kids in matching ski-club outfits ready to go up that we had to negotiate. Unfortunately the ski-club yoot had a competition going on so one of the pistes (the best one according to Pompeyo) was shut.

As we started, the weather wasn’t too bad, a bit windy up top because it’s much more exposed than the other ski resorts I’ve been to here. We enjoyed powdery hard pistes (refreshing after a couple of trips with spring wet snow).

Is this a red or a blue?

After a couple of hours the clouds came down and we skied on in very poor visibilty. At times the tiny snowflakes were driven hard into our faces by the wind, and the combination of that, and the ice forming on our goggles meant that on a couple of occasions we really had to work hard to figure out where the hell the piste went.

Another entertaining difficulty was that the ice on the piste markers made them all the same colour (I don’t think it was my colour blindness). So I have no idea what colours the pistes were. The majority are either red or blue, but they’re wide and smooth so they’re easy reds (even the last one which we did with zero visibilty).

All in all a good morning. We bailed as the weather closed in, three and a half hours of skiing (€16 for the half day pass) and were home by 1:45. According to the web site there’s a bus we can get up to Pajares so I’ll have to go up there with Liz at some point.