Julische Alpen

Marco Milanese is an alpine mountain guide, a modern adventurer and certainly a local legend in Friuli-Venezia-Giulia. The variety of his mountain activities is astonishing, based upon alpine climbing, reaching towards highlining and base jumping, but also incorporating skitouring, freeriding and speedflying. In this interview we try to find out about Marco and how he manages such a variety of mountain activities, how he deals with risk and what he was doing last winter.

The südstau has delivered, the mountains are full of white splendor. The videos are still lagging a little behind, but we're already seeing something from the Italian Dolomites! Plus a fresh film from Austria and a slightly older French one from the Julian Alps. Also: once again, we can't get past Nikolai Schirmer.

On the way back to a normal season? After the rather tough course of this winter, some regions, at least in the west, are now on the way to an average season. There is a base and it continues to snow. Ullr is also making a rendezvous in the south-east and there's still plenty of snow above 1800m.

Stormy Yulia visited us before the current low Zehra. By now, we are used to stormy conditions with horizontal rain at 2000m and extreme wind peaks in the lowlands. Storm Yulia joined Petra, Sabine and Victoria in this respect last weekend.

The time has come to really step on the gas. The Oracle is live in alarm number 2 and it's really nice to be able to ride bottomless with face shots on day one of the season. The stone skis stay mothballed and the fat slats are happy - nice!

All your base are belong to us! The internet meme always makes sense in a skiing context and Ullr sends us dump number 2 to the south. Now you can finally swap your stone skis for the good slats and go skiing. By that, however, I still mean relaxed early-season turns and not shooting with the handbrake off.

Ullr has ordered a strange weather situation: Once for all powder and in the southeast also with sharp in terms of volumes. Unfortunately, there isn't cold powder for everyone, as Ullr is busy spreading the low over the whole of the Alps. And since air mass opposites, roughly simplified, are responsible for our lows, there has to be warm air on one side.

Today, Wednesday, is still characterized by a short-lived intermediate high, but there is already a strong new low off the Iberian Peninsula. Bit by bit, it is closing in on the high and should make its presence felt as early as tomorrow night with a strong south-westerly flow.

After minor snowfalls here and there, Ullr is now bringing alarm-worthy amounts to the south again. It has already started to snow and there will be a lot by Monday. The problem with southern alerts in spring is of course the high snow line in the south, in addition to the foehn in the north.

There is finally cold powder again, unfortunately there is only an alert in the south-east, while in the north only small amounts fall just below the alert. The westernmost tips of France and Switzerland could be an exception.

It's getting warmer and everyone fears the worst, but Ullr comes back on stage with verve and roars: ARE YOU READY? If you don't know the allusion from the metal mockumentary "This is Spinal Tap", you're in luck:

As announced, the alerts continue seamlessly. It has started to snow in the west with the warm front and this will spread to the south. Ullr doesn't do things by halves, because the whole thing will be enormous and produce a massive blanket of snow in the south from a standing start. This will probably be the heaviest dump of the winter so far, but it will be warm and accompanied by foehn storms in the north. However, the amounts will be in the newspaper reporting range. #snowpocalyspenow!