Large Boulder cuts off Val Thoren / Gondola hit by falling tree in Italy

I am surprised nobody has started a thread on this one.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11443072/Skiers-trapped-in-the-Alps-after-huge-boulder-blocks-mountain-road.html. Caused chaos the weekend before last with a 50 mile tailback on the motorway heading towards the area. Apparently those who were due to leave were being brought out on minibuses down a single lane track that was decidedly hairy :shock:. The road was severely damaged so I don't know if it is fully open again. Presumably the big rock has been cleared away :lol:. Thankfully, the rock did not hit a car or bus when it fell.

The other "disaster" in the past week is the tree falling on the line supporting the Ciampinoi gondola in Val Gardena. Thankfully, the wires held and rescue teams were able to get some 200 skiers off the lift safely.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/snowandski/skiing-news/11461418/New-video-cable-car-ski-rescue-in-Italy.html. I had assumed that the lift would be closed for quite some time while engineers checked it out for damage, etc, but apparently, it reopened very soon afterwards. I suspect traffic on it is somewhat lighter than usual :roll:. It is a key lift on the Sella Ronda circuit so I guess they didn't hang around in terms of repairs/inspections :wink:.

..... and to think we do this for fun :mrgreen:.

Thanks Wanderer :)

Here's the Telegraph's photo of the huge rock blocking the road to Moutiers, taken from that article.

It was very lucky it didn't fall on a car, or coach! :shock:

Mountains are fun, but they are not amusement parks and things like that can happen. My boss was driving up when this happen, there was a massive traffic jam as a result and it took him almost 2 hours to be able to turn back to Geneva. He only found out what happened on Monday when I told him.

Blame Crystal. Seems to be their fault for everything this season ;)

Rock falls like that are a frequent occurrence in the alps http://goo.gl/l2DrEr fortunately most of the time nobody gets hurt.

The incident at Val Gardena could have been pretty nasty if the tree had knocked the gondola off the cable.



The tree doesn't look big enough to have damaged the cable, they will have probably removed the gondola from the cable to check the clamping mechanising once they got it back to the garage.