alan little’s weblog

Kitzbühel ☆

14th January 2009 permanent link

Times visited:	twice
Last visited:	January 2001
Rating:	Don’t bother

Kitzbühel is a famous, popular and generally highly rated ski resort. I don’t like it at all.

Kitzbühel actually has two reputations. One is that it’s a fashionable hangout for Munich’s – and, so I hear, increasingly Moscow’s – rich and famous. A kind of low-altitude St. Moritz. Which doesn’t really interest me either way. The other is that the ski area itself seems to be very much liked by proficient skiers. Which I don’t get.

A caveat: my two visits to Kitzbühel were early on in my snowboarding career and I might form a different opinion in the (admittedly unlikely) event I were to go there again now. And it’s a big area: the parts of it I haven’t visited might be better than the ones I have. But. I have two major objections to snowboarding at Kitzbühel. One is that the the area consists of lots of small mountains, with lots of flat and narrow ski tracks to get between them. Snowboarder hell. The other is that I like long, sweeping runs where I can get into my rhythm, and days when I spend more time on snow than on lifts. Kitzbühel consists of lots of small mountains and the runs, although they might be very nice and interesting in other ways, tend to be short.

I took twenty minutes to go down the world famous Hahnenkamm downhill run. I only have to improve by a single of of magnitude, and I could be contender.

related entries: Snowboarding

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