Location Report - Gjeravica, Kosovo
January 2022 - Gjeravica, Kosovo alps.
Zak Emerson and the BackDrop Crew enjoy a wild ride at the LynxFreed Ride catski lodge.
Snow Conditions & Weather
There’d been a dump just days before we arrived in temperatures of -20C. Warmed up to -5C during the day / -15C at night.
Some awesome pow stashes to be found in the trees, but all aspects above were increasingly wind-blown, creating icy sculptural slabs and patchy conditions. Tough riding, but a useful reminder we can’t pick and choose conditions. The snow is constantly changing, and we must adapt riding styles and lines.
From a snow pit and considerable knowledge of our local guides about daily conditions this season, the solid snowpack gave us confidence it was a lower end avi risk. There were very few visible signs of naturally triggered slides on any aspect. No significant weak layers persisted as far as we could find. We experienced no wumpfing or cracking on steeper angles.
We still refreshed the team on search and rescue drills. We left plenty of space between us and avoided terrain traps. This is not a place to get caught out, it’s properly isolated.
What went down
We cat skied a week with the awesome lads from Lynxfreeride. They found us new and interesting terrain every ride, every day. We rarely repeated the same line as the entire valley, mountain, domain is empty of any other people. It’s like the Alps must’ve been 100 years ago: farm huts, A-frame cabins scattered about, no infrastructure, wild untamed beauty.
There are no other skiers anywhere, except one day we did bump into Austrian freeride legend Fabian Letsch, he was skinning up pre-season training. We were stoked to learn he was also staying at the LynxLodge, so we teamed up and rode a bunch of lines with him the next day.
What a lovely fella. He’s just about to drop a RedBull documentary he’d been shooting in Iran for two years, riding with locals he hung out and decided it was best to go full immersion and so learned Iranian. The entire crew had an on-the-spot man-crush. Wholely impressive human, kind, super chilled and madly bright.
We opted out of the cat one day, skinned over a windswept expanse up to the Albanian border on Mt. Gusan – gaining the ridge to a breath-taking evening view - the epic mountain-scape brought an avalanche of questions about future projects.
Yes, there’s stacks of unclimbed and unridden mountains to be explored over the entire region. Lynx have hut to hut plans taking in Kosovo, Albania, Montenegro. We asked about mixed catski / heli / splitboarding projects - they said ‘yes it’s all possible all of the above’.
As the snow got more challenging, we did a night snow dance over a few beers, howled into the night sky and shot some guns. The Mountain Gods were listening: the flakes began to fall from the inky blackness. Next day was K-pow. Pure Kosovan Pow. We did an awful lot of descent looping the mountain until darkness fell. We will all remember it as ‘THAT day in Kosovo’. Epic.
Special note, the local guides at Lynx Freeride are super nice, super kind, super knowledgeable. We were in great hands. Mega food, great company to hang in, great riders all of them. Checking our diaries for a return trip!
Longer dispatch article on Kosovo adventures coming soon!
