The Passo dello Stelvio, at 2,758 metres, is the second-highest paved mountain pass in the Alps. It closes each winter, generally in early November, when snow makes the road impassable, and reopens each spring, generally in late May, when a crew from the provincial road authority of Sondrio has cut a single lane through the accumulated snow of the season.
On the evening of 18 May 2026, the lead operator on the Lombardy side of the cut, Beppe Gardenghi, climbed into the cab of a Rolba R 1500 rotary snow blower at the edge of the pass, started the engine, and resumed work that he and a crew of seven others had been performing, in twelve-hour shifts, for the previous nineteen days.
Gardenghi is 56. He has worked on the Stelvio cut since 1992. He has, by his own count, opened the pass thirty-two times, missing only two years for surgeries and one year, in 2019, when an unusually warm April had reduced the snowpack to the point that the cut took only eleven days.
The 2026 cut would take, in the end, twenty-three days. The snowpack at the summit was 5.2 metres at its deepest. The total length of road to be cleared from the Bormio side was nineteen kilometres. The crew's progress, on a typical day, was between seven hundred and twelve hundred linear metres.
The snow blower, an Italian-built machine weighing approximately twenty-two tons, throws snow at a rate of up to five thousand tons per hour from a fifteen-hundred-millimetre cutting head. It is driven slowly. Its operator wears ear protection. The cab is heated, but Gardenghi keeps the window cracked because, he says, the smell of the diesel exhaust is the way he knows the engine is happy.
He works through the night because the snow is harder when it is cold, and because the bright LED work lights of the machine reflect off the snow walls in a way that, while bright, makes the work easier on the eyes than the high noon glare.
The walls themselves are the most visible aspect of the cut. As the blower advances, it leaves behind a corridor of road flanked on both sides by snow that stands, in the deepest sections of the pass, more than five metres above the pavement. The walls are vertical, sometimes overhanging slightly, with the texture of the cutting head visible as horizontal striations along their faces.
Tourists who arrive in the first weeks after the road opens will stop in pull-outs to photograph the walls. The walls will retreat at a rate of perhaps a metre per week through June, and by early July will be merely banks. By August, in most years, the snow will be entirely gone.
Gardenghi does not stop to photograph the walls. He says he sees them every year. He says they are the same walls every year.
The crew works in pairs. Gardenghi, in the blower, is paired with a second operator named Salvo Vitiello, 34, who drives a wheel loader behind the blower to clear the small drifts that the machine leaves in the corners. A third worker, on most shifts, drives a snowplough at the head of the operation to push back the lighter top layer of any new snowfall that may have arrived overnight.
On the evening of the 18th, Vitiello was in the wheel loader. The third operator, a younger man named Pasquale Marrone, was on a break, having worked the previous shift.
The work was slow. The snow at this elevation, in mid-May, was a mix of old, settled winter snowpack and a sequence of melt-freeze crusts that had formed in the spring sun. The crusts were the harder material. The blower's cutting head, designed for a softer snow, occasionally caught on them and required the operator to back off and re-engage at a slightly different angle.
Gardenghi developed this technique over twenty years. He cannot, when asked, fully describe it. He says he can feel through the controls when the head is fighting and when it is cutting cleanly, and he adjusts.
The crew working the Bormio side of the cut is one of two crews. The second, working from the South Tyrol side of the pass, is operated by the provincial road authority of Bolzano. The two crews work independently, on different schedules, with different equipment, and they meet, in the last days of the cut, somewhere near the summit at a point that is determined by the relative progress of each side.
There is a small, friendly competition between the two crews about which side reaches the summit first. There is also a serious operational coordination, conducted by radio between the two foremen, to ensure that the meeting itself happens safely.
On the morning of the 21st, the South Tyrolean crew radioed Gardenghi to report that they were three hundred metres from the summit on their side. Gardenghi, who was approximately five hundred metres from the summit on his side, replied that he expected to make the meeting by the evening of the 22nd. The South Tyrolean foreman said they would wait at three hundred metres and finish in the morning, to allow both crews to arrive at the same time.
This is the tradition. The two crews meet at the summit, shake hands, and have a coffee together at the Albergo Passo Stelvio if the hotel has opened for the season, or out of a thermos on the road if it has not.
On 23 May 2026 at 0942, the two cuts joined. The road was, technically, open. Gardenghi shook hands with his South Tyrolean counterpart, a man named Florian Pichler whom he has known for nineteen years. They drank coffee from a thermos. They did not speak about the work. They spoke about a mutual acquaintance who had recently retired.
The road did not open to public traffic until 28 May, after the snow walls had been further trimmed, the drainage cleared, the road surface inspected for damage, and the signage and barriers replaced. Cyclists, who watch the pass status more carefully than any other group of users, began to arrive on the morning of the 28th.
Gardenghi went home to Bormio on the afternoon of the 23rd, slept for fifteen hours, and reported back to the road authority's depot on the 25th for the next phase of the spring road program, which would take him to a smaller pass at lower elevation. He will, in early November, drive to the Stelvio depot to put the blower away for the winter. He will return to it in May 2027.
