I’ve been going to Bansko on and off for around six years, usually around March. It was never the biggest resort I’d ridden, never the most polished, and never the place I’d recommend to someone chasing endless piste mileage. That was kind of the point. The more I went, the more I realised that what made Bansko good was how quickly you got to know it.
The piste area is fairly compact, and after a couple of days you stop needing to think about where you’re going. You know which lift takes you where, which run you like, where the little banks are, and where the side hits start appearing. By the middle of the week you are riding the same runs differently because you know what is coming. Instead of spending half the day travelling across a massive resort, you start sessioning the mountain you have in front of you.
That suited me perfectly. I’d spot a little lip off the side of a piste, hit it badly, come back around and try it again. Then faster. Then with something slightly more stupid in mind. I honestly don’t think I’ve had as many ridiculous crashes anywhere as I have in Bansko, mainly because there are so many small things packed into a short amount of terrain that you end up throwing yourself at everything. The run itself might be the same one you did an hour earlier, but what you do with it keeps changing.
There is a park, but I would never describe Bansko as a park destination. Whenever I was there it was small, usually a handful of rails and one or two modest jumps. The mountain itself was more fun. The natural hits, banks and little bits you find on the edges gave me more than enough to mess around with.
Getting onto the mountain
The queues were probably the thing that annoyed me most. The main gondola could get busy and some mornings it felt like a decent chunk of the day was disappearing before you had even started riding.
Eventually we found a way around that. Instead of joining the main queue in town, we would get a taxi out toward one of the lower lifts in the woods. At the time it was costing us roughly five lev, and we could be moving while everyone else was still waiting for the gondola. A lot of mornings it meant we were effectively some of the first people getting higher up the mountain.
It felt like cheating, but in the best possible way. For almost no money, we were getting onto the snow early and making the most of the quieter part of the morning. I would not turn up now expecting the exact same five lev taxi trick to work exactly as it did when I was going. Things change, but understanding how the ski area actually connects is worth doing rather than blindly joining the biggest queue every day.
March was always my favourite time to go. Across the trips I did, it generally felt quieter than the busiest winter periods and I still had some brilliant snow. Obviously that changes year to year, so I would never say March guarantees good conditions, but it consistently worked for me.
When it had snowed recently, Bansko could be ridiculously good off piste. The fact that the resort is relatively easy to understand also makes it tempting to start exploring further away from the marked runs.
That is also how I managed to turn one decent powder run into about four hours of walking.
The wrong turn
I remember seeing a completely untouched patch of snow and wondering why nobody had gone down it. It looked perfect. Clean snow, no tracks, nobody around. So obviously I decided I had found something everyone else had somehow missed.
For a while it was brilliant. Then the slope started flattening out, and then it kept flattening out until I realised I had basically ridden myself onto a completely flat lake area with deep fresh snow sitting on top of it.
There was nowhere useful to continue, so I decided I had to turn around.
That was when I realised how much trouble I had created for myself. The snow had only recently fallen and it was unbelievably soft and deep. Walking through it was horrible. You would take a few steps, sink straight in, drag yourself out, and repeat. At points it felt like ten minutes of work would get me no more than twenty metres.
I had been going for what felt like forever when I eventually heard snowmobiles. Two guys came past and I flagged them down. I asked which direction I needed to go and whether there was any chance they could give me a lift.
They asked where I was from.
I said England.
They just drove off.
Absolute wankers.
So I carried on walking.
After a couple of hours I came across one of the strangest things I have ever found on a mountain. There was a Red Bull arch sitting in the middle of nowhere. No event, no people, nothing else around it. Just this random arch surrounded by snow.
I assume something had taken place there at some point, but I didn’t really care why it existed. What mattered was that there were packed tracks leading away from it.
After spending hours sinking into fresh snow, being able to walk on something firm felt incredible. I followed the tracks and eventually they brought me back toward the resort.
The whole thing took around four hours.
It is funny now. It was much less funny while I was doing it.
The lesson I took from it was pretty obvious. Untouched snow does not automatically mean you have found some hidden perfect line. Sometimes it is untouched because everyone else knows it leads somewhere useless. Since then, I have been a lot more interested in knowing where a line finishes before committing to it.
Cheap trips and good nights
One of the reasons I kept going back to Bansko was how affordable the whole trip could be.
Hotels were cheap. Flights could be cheap. Food and beer were cheap. Even eating on the mountain felt reasonable compared with a lot of Alpine resorts. You could ride all day, eat properly, go out at night and do it all again without feeling like every part of the trip was hammering your bank account.
The lift pass is the part that has changed the most. I would not sell Bansko now purely as somewhere with a dirt-cheap mountain ticket. The wider trip can still work out well because accommodation, food and nightlife can be much cheaper than the Alps, but the lift pass itself does not feel like the bargain it once did.
Bansko as a town has always felt a little unusual too. Bulgaria can feel fairly run down in places, then you arrive in Bansko and it is obvious that the resort brings a lot of money into that particular area. It still does not feel polished in the same way as a major French resort, but I actually like that about it. It has more character.
The nightlife was always good. Nothing complicated. Ride all day, eat a lot, drink cheap beer, go out, wake up and do it again.
The other thing I always remember is the animals.
There are cats and dogs everywhere. A lot of them are clearly living on the streets, which is genuinely sad to see, but so many of them are unbelievably friendly. They will come over, sit with you, let you stroke them, and if you have food you have basically got a new best friend.
I spent plenty of nights before or after going out buying dog and cat food and wandering around feeding them. It became one of those weird little parts of the trip I always remember just as much as some of the riding.
Why I would go back
I have not been for a couple of years now, but I would definitely go again.
Bansko is not somewhere I would recommend because it has the biggest piste map, the best park or the most impressive infrastructure. There are obviously resorts that do all of those things better.
What I like about it is how rideable it becomes once you know it.
You can learn the mountain quickly, start finding all the smaller bits of terrain, and spend the week trying to ride the same places better. The repetition becomes part of the fun rather than something that makes it boring.
By the end of the trip, the mountain feels familiar enough that you stop thinking about where you are going and start thinking about how you want to ride it.
That is probably the best way I can describe Bansko.
It is not the Alps, and it does not need to be.
It is somewhere you can go, spend relatively little on the wider trip, get good snow, ride a lot, eat well, go out at night and come home with a ridiculous number of stories.
Including, apparently, one about getting stranded in deep snow for four hours because I thought I had discovered a secret powder line.
