Planica Ski Jump

If you're daft enough to ski jump, this is your view!

More posts to come about Ljubljana, but Friday we headed up to the northwest area of Slovenia to Planica. This is in the valley region of heavy WWI fighting in the Slovenian - Italian - Austrian region where Hemingway served and inspired his "Farewell to Arms" which I now need to read. The Julian Alps (after Caesar) and the Karawanken range is all along here, along with Triglav - the highest peak in Slovenia.

Planica is the site of the Olympic Training Centre, with a hotel for athletes that Igor helped convert with hypoxic rooms on the 2nd floor for altitude training. There are many ski jumps at Planica, from baby ones that almost tempts you into thinking you too can do this, to the full 90 m jumps.

There is even an underground nordic ski facility for training throughout the year, along with a skydiving simulator! Many hiking and climbing trails abound too, along with Nordic trails.

Really, it's pretty hard to capture the scale of just how big and high ski jumps are.

Planica is a regular stop on the World Cup circuit, and apparently has been the site of several world record jumps, including the 1999 record of 239 m!

There hasn't been any notable snow, so just these jumps have artificial snow on them. Here, I was trying to capture the scale of the jump with the athlete in the foreground for perspective. Luckily they have ski lifts to haul them back up top.

From the "Better to apologize than ask permission" playbook, found the stairs and started walking up to get closer pictures of the jumping. This was my next to last stop for trying to catch action shots. I then walked up higher to an even better spot, just in time to find out this guy was the final jumper of the day. Cosmic payback I guess.

Yes, the runs are so steep that the cats need safety harnesses.

You start young in ski jumping, likely so that you catch them before sanity takes over...