The blue of the train station is the only friendly color of our destination. Apatity was founded because of the occurrence of "apatite", a rare mineral used for fertilizer. And that's how it looks here too...
...The town is gray and desolate. Prefabricated buildings between neglected, smoking chimneys. The colorful groups of winter sports enthusiasts who tumble off the train here seem like foreign bodies from another, happier world. Valodja and Dimitri, our guides from Kirovsk, are already waiting for us. After a brief, friendly greeting and a skeptical glance at our mountains of equipment, Valodja tells us: "Much snow in the mountains - serious avalanche danger now!" We are curious to see what it looks like on the ground. We speed along the snow-covered roads to Kirovsk in the minibus. The town welcomes us with unplastered prefabricated buildings and its very own charm. The flair is far removed from that of a winter sports resort. Snowboarding in an industrial area is the best way to describe it. But the unbelievable beauty is that the snow-covered mountain flanks around the village rise up into the sky. The village is only 300 m above sea level and the highest peaks are almost 1200 m high. That means downhill runs of 900 m and more. From easy pleasure runs on the wide, gentle ridges, to hilly terrain with small jumps and cornices to play in, to really rugged big mountain lines through gullies and steep slopes, everything seems to be possible.
Our first snowboarding day greets us with bright sunshine. Today we want to ride the lifts in Kirovsk to acclimatize and get an impression of the terrain and snow conditions. There are three small ski areas around the town, each with two or three old-fashioned T-bar and chair lifts. There is no slope grooming due to the lack of snow groomers, so the slopes adapt to the conditions of the mountains. The sporting level of the many winter sports enthusiasts is astonishingly high and even without groomed pistes, they swing and carve down the mountains quickly. To be able to join in, we need lift tickets. We have to kneel down - that's what everyone does here! The ticket counter is so low that you have to crouch down to be able to look inside, as it consists of a decommissioned, converted amusement arcade machine.
The lift ride is also adventurous: on the old T-bar lift, it's only when you get on that you decide whether you get a T-bar and can lift in pairs, or just a plate, as we know them from old French and Italian lifts, or whether the bar is missing altogether. The steep path to the top is a balancing act, as there is no prepared lift track. Shortly before the exit, you have to negotiate a field of knee-high wind gnats.
