New Beginner Park Opens At Zermatt

Zermatt and Cervinia have unveiled a new year-round snow fun park located between the two resorts at Plateau Rosa.

The new SnowXperience Plateau Rosa beginner park, located on the Italian border next to the valley station of the new Matterhorn Glacier Ride II lift, which opened two months ago, will be partially operational from 1st September.

Aimed at beginners, the park will allow people to have their first ski or snowboarding lessons on snow.

Equipment rental is available on site at the Zermatters - Outdoor Experience for 79 Swiss Francs and the cost also includes the services of a ski school instructor based at the park to provide advice.

Entry to the park is automatically included with a Zermatt - Testa Grigia lift pass or the full Matterhorn Alpine Crossing Ticket over to Cervinia.

Later this autumn the new park will be enhanced with a new covered conveyor lift and from 2024 a snow-tubing facility will be added.

Sounds like they are replicating the Jungfraujoch Snow Fun Park https://www.jungfrau.ch/en-gb/jungfraujoch-top-of-europe/snow-fun-park/ which seems to be popular with Asian tourists.



It would be interesting to know where they are getting the snow from, these days it's nearly all gone from Testa Grigia by the end of July.



The Alpine Crossing is mainly intended for American and Asian tourists who fly in to Milan / Turin in order to visit Florence, Siena, San Gimignano, Pisa etc. before going on to Paris. The idea is to get them to travel to Paris via Cervinia and Zermatt.

The infrastructure that forms Cervinia's part of the Alpine Crossing is quite old and is badly in need of updating. In 2019 Cervino SpA held an architectural competition for the redevelopment of the area and buildings around Testa Grigia, the competition was won by POLICREO S.r.l. http://www.policreo.it/case-studies/show/concorso-di-idee-plateau-rosa it will be interesting to see if it ever gets built.

At the beginning of August Aosta Sera reported that an invitation to tender for the design phase of 2 new lifts to run from Cervinia to Testa Grigia has closed https://aostasera.it/notizie/turismo/si-apre-la-fase-di-progettazione-delle-nuove-funivie-fra-breuil-e-plateau-rosa/ The tender documents have been uploaded to the Cervinia website https://www.cervinia.it/dialogo-competitivo-per-laggiudicazione-della-progettazione-ed-esecuzione-della-nuova-linea-funiviaria-breuil-cervinia-plan-maison-plateau-rosa-c-i-g-9857077d41-c-u-p-h21c23000510009

In an effort to smarten Cervinia up a bit, the carpark next to the cable car / gondola station has been tarmacked. Unfortunately, there is still no word on what they are planning to do with the burnt-out shell of the old cable car station / La Gran Baita hotel.

Very interesting, thanks as always. I've been to that one on the Jungfraujoch and I thought the same when I read about this one. That sad pic of the (lack of) snow cover is very different to the pristine images being posted of the new race course "with 75 days to race day" :)

Your welcome! It depends where you look; most of the downhill race course on the Swiss side is either on a north facing slope or shaded by a ridge, so it looks to be in pretty good shape at the moment. There is a lot less snow on the Italian part of the course, which lower and gets sun for most of the day. The area around Testa Grigia also gets lots of sun so the snow there melts pretty quickly in summer.

This year the races are scheduled to take place a couple of weeks later than they were last year, so there is a better chance of them being able to make enough snow. They built 5 snow depots at the end of last season; last year they only built 2, so they might have enough snow to cover the course even if it's too warm to run the snow cannons.

Fingers crossed then! Do you know if they are doing the snow farming thing and storing snow to spread on the course near the race days (is that the snow depots you mention?) or just relying on natural snow/cold enough for snowmaking by November?

Snow farming is the process of piling snow into heaps and covering it up in order to preserve it for the following season. The snow depots are the covered heaps of snow. In 2018, the cost of storing a cubic metre of snow was reckoned to be about the same as making a cubic metre, so it's likely to be cheaper than making snow now due to the increase in electricity prices. There is some information in English here: https://www.snowfarming.ch/informationen/

According to https://skiracing.com/zermatt-cervinia-races-scheduled-to-open-2023-24-speed-season/ the snow depots that have been built on the Gran Becca race course are made of artificial snow; see "New year, new strategies". So they are in a much better position to run the race than they were last year; it would be very embarrassing if they couldn't run it this year and might result in the FIS removing it from the calendar.

This all crops up in my conversation with Marc Lagger from Zermatt Bergbahnen in Episode 184 (27 mins in), which you might find of interest:
https://theskipodcast.com/resorts/meribel/184-hiking-les-3-vallees-zermatts-alpine-crossing-car-sharing-in-meribel/

Unfortunately, there is no mention of the SnowXperience park in the podcast. In the podcast you said that the concrete for the lift stations was flown in using a helicopter, due of the quantities involved this would have been prohibitively expensive.

When they started to build the Matterhorn Glacier Ride I lift they built a material ropeway that runs from Laghi Cime Bianche up to the Klein Matterhorn. The concrete for all 3 lift stations was mixed in a batching plant at Laghi Cime Bianche and transported to where it was needed in a skip. The ropeway was also used to transport all the other materials and the lift components.



There is a render of the SnowXperience park on the Zermatters ski school website https://www.zermatters.ch/index.php/en/touch-snow as you can see it's located directly in front of the lift station in an area that was already snow free in June when the photo above was taken.