Summits Safari ‘24 | Alps & Dolomites Tour
This tour was nothing short of extraordinary. The weather certainly threw everything at us it could, including deep snow, Ice, rain and thankfully some lovely sun, but all in all it made this a real driving challenge from start to finish for everyone that took part!
The carefully selected routes through the Black Forest down into Switzerland to the Alps, and into the Dolomites, delivered on every level and certainly lived up to their reputation, offering everything a driving enthusiast could hope for—smooth, winding roads, thrilling straights and breathtaking scenery at every turn.
To wake up in Andermatt in mid September and look out the window to see a foot of snow and snow ploughs heading up the road, was not something we could do anything about, and we quickly discovered that the infamous Andermatt Loop that was planned for day 3 around the Susten, Furka and Grimsel passes were simply not possible, after friends were snowed in on the Grimsel Pass. Thankfully we were not in that predicament, as they ended up being there for 3 nights!
This resulted in us heading directly across to St Moritz to try and escape the snow, as reports said it was fine further East. Well the upside to the conditions was it meant the main route over the San Gottardo Pass out of Andermatt had no traffic, other than our 12 supercars and 2 snow ploughs! There’s always an upside in our book!
On approach to St Moritz it became clear that this was going to be a challenging drive, and if you had told us 5 years ago that we would be leading 12 cars up the fantastic Julier Pass, which was fast becoming a single lane due the snow drifts, we would not have believed it!
This was the single stand out memory for us in 2024, it was so cool (sorry about the pun) to have the cars in the mirrors and calling “caution, snow drift on right,” something I never thought we would be calling!
The following day saw us battle with similar conditions, and resulted in us only being able to tackle the Umbrail Pass on the Stelvio (hats off to the 3 guys that decided to crest the summit!), as there was simply too much ice at the summit to contemplate crossing over the top. Luckily we were able to change our planned coffee stop to a lunch stop at a gorgeous hotel that looks up at the Stelvio, where we enjoyed the most amazing food.
After putting together a route across to our stunning hotel on the edge of the Dolomites in Pinzolo, we were all off on a voyage of discovery together. As mentioned before, there is always a flip side, and it proved to be the case yet again, as we found some epic roads that were arguably far better than those we missed on the Stelvio itself!
