20 kilometres of almost continuos grade IV and IV+ with no portages and the Italian International Slalom site.
This river reads like a teenage white water addict's masturbatory fantasy but it's all true. The river exists and is an excellent place to go. I would suggest spending a couple of days in this valley so that you can spend a day playing on the first half which includes the slalom course. The second day is then available to use either playing the second half, or getting on into the gorge at the end. We were only here for a day and bombed down the river in a little over 3 hours. This is too quick to really enjoy the place.
To get to the right valley you turn off the Brenner autostrada between Bolzen and Trento up the S43 and onwards to the S42. Drive up the valley to the get in at Cuisano by a road bridge in the middle of the village. From here to Dimaro you have 10km of grade IV water with one or two IV+ rapids and three weirs. The wiers are all runnable and one even has a wooden ramp for the rafts to go down. Hence we rafted up for the event! About three kilometers down this stretch you come to the slalom site at Mezzana. We ran this without inspection but be warned there are some chunky stoppers in there.
The second section can be considered to start at Dimaro and go down to a bridge near Bordiana called Pont Stori. This is another rafting get out and they have a shack like affair that is useful in the rain. From here down is the final gorge section which I haven't done but is written up very competantly in Slime's Northern Alps guide. It's IV+ to V so be warned.
This is a fun Welsh type river, being shallow and fast, generally grade III. To get there follow the road up the valley to Rhêmes from the S26.
There is a guage under the bridge halfway down the section. When we did this it was on 5 on this guage. The get in is in the village of Rhêmes, just by the two weirs. These are both scrapes at low water at the level we ran the river. The rest of the river proved to be grade III-IV and could be inspected from the boat. The character is that of the low water Welsh rivers we are all so used to, with small but frequent breakouts. Not something to do in a fibre boat! We got out by some road works where the river goes through some pipes under the road. It may be possible to continue lower down, but the river soon enters an area of cataracts which we didn't look at.
Despite a nice write up in the guide, we found a very unpleasant looking river. We arrived after rain and so saw the river at a high level but probably not in flood. Due to extensive canalisation from the get in by a large car park on the main road, right into the town there were no breakouts and some very dangerous weirs. In addition to this, some of the reinforcement bars from the artificial banks were visible, so we went for nice walk.
We didn't do this section when we were here, so you'll have to look it up for yourself. It should be a fair bit of big water grade V, running down into the next grade IV section.
Very good fun highish volume grade IV. Very fast and continuous but not too hard at this grade. Breakouts were not a problem and to whole section was inspected from the boat. In high levels this could be much more serious as a pipe is said to approach the surface of the water. When we went down the only pipe across the river was a good foot or more above our heads!
A nice swiftly flowing grade III. Towards the end was a big construction area with a dodgy man-made weir within artificial earth banks. This had to be looked at from the bank through lack of breakouts. What they're doing here is anyone's guess so it may change radically in a few years. Get out in the lake, or go on down the weir/slide (they do it in rafts, so it can't be too bad!) The next section is supposed to be grade IV, and the gorge section after is said to be unrun.
You can get in by the campsite if the multitude of mini weirs look OK. The first main section is very high volume grade IV, and is worth a look. Swimmers tend to vanish off down the river a bit sharpish. Later the river becomes more high volume grade III until the get out below the road bridge crossing the river for Cogne. In the grade three section, look out for a cunningly disguised double weir. Its hard to spot the second drop!
A long and not especially pretty grade II, with a few weirs and barrages and lots of canalised industrialised river banks. Driving the bus through Aosta is a bitch too.
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