Spring fun in Italy

This past Spring has been one of the red letter seasons, that you hear about from of the old guard, going on about big snow pack years, where the Piemonte paddling season lasted into June and even beyond. In recent years there has been good to excellent snow conditions, yet all to often the whole lot comes down the river in mid April with some freak Easter hot weekend, or near monsoon rain for 10 days. However the Spring of 2009 was very different, the snow melted in a timely fashion, means that every day was world class, nearly every popular run was in high water conditions and even more special were all the lesser known, yet highly prized more remote runs were prime and good to go for all of May, and what a feast of sunshine steep creekin’ it was. Here is the Cervo, a small run from low altitude that faces mainly south dropping into Biellia close to Valsesia. The putin is a sun spot, check out all those sun lizards, plus see the red kayak in the river left eddy, well that was Dr Stefan from Vienna giving an example of the near prefect roll to the bikini clan ladies, I think he liked their smiles…..

In late May the boys from Palm came over for a little photoshot and some fine paddling……….

Too read the rest of this blog entry go to: Simon Westgarth’s Blog