Vitosha Mountain – an Adventure in Skiing

This weekend I managed to hit the slopes and try out my new (used) skis. My first trip, on Saturday, was to Vitosha Mountain. The ski area on Vitosha is relatively small, but the mountain is only 15 minutes away from the city and is accessible by city bus so it has a significant ease-of-accessibility advantage. Joel still had to buy boots and a bib Saturday morning so we got up there around noon. The directions to Simeonovo gondola are quite easy from Lozenets (my neighborhood); you take a left on the ring road then take a right when you see the hookers. Easy.

The way the system works is that you take the gondola 5km or so up the mountain to where the actual ski runs are. When we got to the gondola the line was pretty long. It took us about 45 minutes to get up to the cashier where we found out that the bottleneck wasn’t with the gondola, it was with the cashier. There were two cashier windows, but only one cashier working so she couldn’t take money fast enough to fill the gondolas. In fact, half the gondolas were going up empty because of this. This goes back to my hypothesis that many Bulgarians will go out of their way to avoid making money. Just hire another cashier and you’ll make fill the other gondolas and make nearly twice as much money! No, no – we don’t want that.

A round trip ticket on the gondola was 6 BGN – or about $4. Once we finally got on it took about 30 minutes to get up to the ski area. We hopped into a hut at the top to change into our ski boots. There was a ski repair booth in the hut where Joel was able to get his bindings adjusted to his new boots for $0.60. I used the restroom where I, annoyingly, had to pay 0.30 BGN (although paying to use the bathroom here is usually the rule rather than the exception so I wasn’t surprised). We step outside and skied down a short hill to a Poma lift where we could get further up the mountain.

The setup of Vitosha is very odd. Different lifts are owned by different companies so you have to buy different tickets depending on which lifts you use. Alternatively you can just pay a fee each time you ride the lift. While waiting in line for the Poma lift a kid offered to sell his day passes for two of the lifts for a discounted price. Joel and I bought them wondering if they were legit – but knowing if they weren’t we would only be out $5 which, combined with the $4 gondola ride, was our total cost for a half day of skiing. The tickets ended up being alright – although we only had to show them once the whole day. As it turns out the other lift that our tickets were good for was basically the only good lift on the mountain so we sort of lucked out.

The “lift ticket” was different than you would expect from a normal lift ticket. The Bulgarian Ministry of Finance prints generic tickets in 2 BGN dominations. There tickets are used everywhere – conferences, movies, trade shows, concerts, the opera – basically anything that requires a ticket. If something costs 10 BGN they just take five of the 2 BGN tickets and staple them together. This is what our “lift tickets” were at Vitosha. It was a bunch of 2 BGN official Ministry of Finance tickets stapled together with the date written on top with a Sharpie marker. Nice.

This first Poma lift was very annoying. The line was long and there was only one row on the lift. However, while waiting we were able to take in more of the Vitosha carnival. A ski run went through the Poma line so we were able to get a good look at some of the clientele. First I saw a few skiers come down – fairly normal. Next came some snowboarders – still normal. Then I saw some people were just up there in hiking boots hiking around the ski area – a bit odd. After a bit, five mountain bikers came riding down the trail – huh? Then down comes a dog. Sure, bring your dog up to the slope – perfectly normal. I will have to say, the dog was having the time of his life. I knew that because he seemed to have a big smile on his face while he took a crap in the middle of the Poma line. The dog wasn’t the only one relieving himself, however. As I look back up to the lift I see the lift operator taking a piss off the back of the lift shack – in full view of everyone waiting in line. He made it that much more accentuated by aiming at the tree directly across, ensuring a large splatter, a loud “piss hitting the tree” noise, and a lot of steam. Super.

The equipment people had on Vitosha was also interesting. If I had to guess what year it was solely by looking at the equipment of the surrounding skiers, I would say it was 1987 – there was some old school ski equipment up there! It looked like most 80’s-vintage rental equipment from the US and Western Europe had made it to Bulgaria.

Joel and I finally get up to the Poma lift and start our trek up the mountain. The Poma ride up was an adventure in and of itself. The trail was not groomed so as you were getting pulled up you were hitting all kinds of little jumps. If the elasticity of the Poma hit just right you would catch air. I don’t mind catching air on the slope when I want to, but I just assume relax a bit when I’m getting dragged up the mountain. There was no relaxing on this lift, you had to pay attention and use your leg muscles.

We get up to the top and make sure we ski down some trails to get us over to the other lift our passes were good for. The snow was decent on the slopes. Some of the slopes were groomed, but the ones at the top were not. There is no snow making at Vitosha.

We get over to the other lift – a T-bar – and run into one of my co-workers who I knew was going to be at the mountain, but didn’t expect to find in the large crowd. He told us this lift was basically the only good one. He and his group had been skiing it all day. This lift had another slow line which we discovered was due to at least 50% of the T-bars being broken. Sometimes a whole string of 10-15 in a row would be broken so the line wouldn’t move at all for a few minutes. Another annoying thing about the lifts at Vitosha is that you have to climb up to them. That is to say, the lifts are all several meters higher than the trail that ends at them, so you have to sidestep up to where the lift is.

In this line I learned that alcohol on the mountain was perfectly acceptable. One guy has brought his bottle of whisky. He and his friends were openly drinking it and passing it around.

We finally get up to the T-bar and start our trek to the top of the mountain. Along the way we see a small section of snow that had avalanched. We followed my coworker and his group off to once side and skied back down to the T-bar. The snow was reasonably deep but wasn’t groomed but it wasn’t powder either. It was sort of powder with a crusty top that made it difficult to get a good turn in. I got my skis caught under the upper crust and had a nice wipe out on one of my runs. There weren’t any trees this high up so you basically had one really wide trail to ski down to get back to the lift. It was pretty short, however.

After a few runs I was happy to see the dog and his owner had made it up to our lift. The dog would chase the owner up the T-bar then chase him back down the mountain. Because of the upper crust on the snow you would see the dog get 15 meters of good running in before he would hit a soft spot and perform an inadvertent face plant. However, the dog would pop right back up, face covered in snow, and continue chasing his owner down the slope. The dog also spent a good amount of time eating snow while his owner was waiting in line.

You could tell Vitosha was a neglected resort (no doubt that different owners for different lifts doesn’t help the situation). There are a number of lifts scattered across the mountain, but I saw several that were non-functional and looked like they had been non-functional for at least a decade. As far as I could tell, there was only one chair lift – an old 2-seater. The other lifts were all T-bar or Poma lifts – and the ones that I saw were pretty ragged. Until Saturday I had only ridden a T-bar once and had never ridden a Poma lift, but that has all changed. The T-bar and Poma lifts also make for an exhausting half day because you are on your feet the entire time.

We finished at 4pm, when the lifts shut down, and rode the gondola back down to the base. The gondola, unlike the lifts, was in pretty good shape. It looked relatively new (within the last 10-15 years) and the two cabins I rode in were fine.

The next day, Sunday, I would go to Borovitz – a “real” ski resort. I will comment on that in my next blog entry.

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