alan little’s weblog archive for january 2009
Togliatti
27th January 2009 permanent link
| Times visited: | once |
| Last visited: | January 2005 |
| Rating: | hmm |
My wife comes from Togliatti, a city in the Russian steppes on the banks of the Volga. From, in other words, one of the least mountainous places in the entire world. It snows there a lot, though. And where there is snow, there are people wanting to slide around on it. To my not inconsiderable surprise, Togliatti has a ski area, situated in the woods where the banks of the Volga are a couple of hundred metres or so high.
I wouldn’t have bothered, necessarily, but my wife’s friend’s teenage daughter and a couple of her friends wanted to try snowboarding, and it had been mentioned that I had done some, so I was appointed snowboard teacher for an afternoon. I think at the time this was my second day snowboarding in four years. But not to be too hard on myself – the quality of instruction those kids received was quite possibly better than nothing. About the same level, in fact, as I received from my friends when I started.
Togliatti is not – need I emphasise this? – somewhere to consider as a ski destination. But snowboarding is something to do for an afternoon should you for some reason happen to find yourself in town – and a good addition to my list of obscure and funky places I have boarded.
If teaching snowboarding to beautiful Russian women should become tedious for some reason, you can go cross country skiing in the woods with beautiful Russian women instead. As my son demonstrates here:
UPDATE 2nd February: we met up with an old friend of my wife in Mittenwald. She clearly hasn’t been home for a while, because she was incredulous when informed that there is a ski area in her home town.
UPDATE II 6th February: good heavens. With a single bound, I leap to the top of a a google search results page.
related entries: Snowboarding
riding fakie
26th January 2009 permanent link
Apparently it’s not called "riding fakie" any more, it’s called “riding switch”. I think of it as “snowboarding backwards”, which makes equally little sense, because you don’t normally snowboard “forwards” anyway. You snowboard sideways; it’ just that people turn out to have one direction in which they can most comfortably snowboard sideways, and after a while that starts to feel like “forwards”. Like most people, I snowboard left foot first or “regular”; the right foot first minority are “goofy”. (I don’t think this corresponds to right- or left-handedness; I have the impression there are more goofy snowboarders than left-handed people)
British snowboarding guide and instructor Neil McNab says in his book that learning to snowboard in the opposite direction is something all snowboarders should learn, both as a technical drill and as a useful skill for some situations on the mountain. On the other hand, American snowboarder and climber Stephen Koch says it is “easier to make turns on the north face of Mount Everest” than to learn to ride switch.
I practice riding switch now and again if I find myself on a particularly easy and uncrowded bit of piste, or if I’m child-minding on the baby slope. On a good day I can string together up to three turns before falling over, at ignominiously low speeds and slope angles. It would have been a possibility for my afternoon at Ödberg, except that doing technique drills and falling over a lot is ok for half an hour, but not for a whole afternoon. Hence the skis.
related entries: Snowboarding
Ödberg
26th January 2009 permanent link
| Times visited: | once |
| Last visited: | January 2009 |
| Rating: | Typical of its kind |
The Problem: you are at a tiny ski area aimed at small children and total beginners. It is a sunny Sunday afternoon, and busy. Snow conditions are not good. You can’t be bothered to spend ten minutes in a lift queue in order to spend two minutes on an easy slope with crappy snow.
The Solution: be a total beginner. Leave your snowboard in the car, rent a pair of skis and spend the afternoon enjoying the thrill of the fall line on the baby slope.
Ödberg is a typical example of a phenomenon that is common throughout the foothills of the Alps: the village ski slope. Almost every village has a sloping field with some snow on it and a drag lift. These are generally friendly places, less intimidating for kids and beginners than a big ski resort, where the baby slopes are often an afterthought crammed in next to the car park. Ödberg is actually bigger than most: it has two baby slopes and a whole five hundred metres of blue slope, complete with an International Ski Federation approved slalom course. There was even a race in progress when we were there.
My son’s kindergarten ski course is taking place here in February, so we thought we’d go and check it out. Ski courses in kindergarten are quite normal in Munich (and probably everywhere else within an hour’s drive of the Alps). My son couldn’t go last year because they are only for over fives – not that anybody has any objection to under fives on skis, far from it. Starting at three or four is normal, and I’ve seen four year olds on the mountain skiing better than most adults. But under fives are too high maintenance in other ways; it would be unfair to expect ski teachers to deal with large troops of them without parents within easy reach.
The snow at Ödberg is thin and rock hard at the moment. The huge dumps of fresh snow that snow-forecast.com is reporting all over the Alps evidently haven’t reached the northernmost foothills.
If your party doesn’t include small children and/or total beginners, Ödberg would not be a wise choice. Spitzingsee is only twenty minutes’ drive away; go there instead.
related entries: Snowboarding
Sölden
26th January 2009 permanent link
| Times visited: | once |
| Last visited: | September 2000 |
| Rating: | might be good in winter |
Hochsölden was the scene of my one and only attempt at summer snowboarding on a glacier. I didn’t like it; very few runs were open, and some were horribly icy.
Expensive too: on the road back down from the glacier I overheated the brakes on my car and ended up having to buy new disks.
A rating would be unfair; for all I known Sölden is probably a great place for winter sports, in winter.
related entries: Snowboarding
Seefeld im Tirol (Rosshütte) ☆☆
24th January 2009 permanent link
| Times visited: | twice |
| Last visited: | January 2009 |
| Rating: | Decent, worth a visit |
Seefeld / Rosshütte is a small but quite pleasant beginner’s resort in the Karwendel mountains near Innsbruck.
My first impressions were not at all favourable: full car parks, crowded slopes, long lift queues. This was, admittedly, in the Christmas-New Year holiday week with supposedly some of the best early season snow in years, so not entirely surprising.
Once up on the mountain, matters improved. Good snow on pleasant, sunny, west-facing slopes. High enough (1,200 to 2,000 metres) that I would expect snow conditions to be pretty reliable. A couple of pleasant blue runs that would be not entirely unchallenging for total beginners, but were ideal for my two not-quite-total-beginner skiers at the start of their second ever season. (Especially after the previous week’s not entirely encouraging outing to Söll.) Spectacular views of the Karwendel mountains from the top lift station, from which a short and straightforward “black” run leads back down to the blue slopes.
Seefeld is a big, busy resort town for such a small ski area. Apparently there are miles and miles of cross country ski trails in the surrounding country, which is a high snowy plateau between the Wetterstein and Karwendel Alps. I assume these are probably the main attraction.
related entries: Snowboarding
bavarian snow conditions
20th January 2009 permanent link
Current Munich city weather: a little above freezing, light rain much of the day yesterday, rain mixed with wet heavy snow falling now.
Huge snowfall a bit higher in the (north eastern) Alps, probably.
Austrian radio weather forecast confirms (click on "Bergwetter", best mountain weather forecast for the Eastern Alps, in German), says snowfall currently actually heaviest in the south eastern Alps.
related entries: Snowboarding
Serfaus-Fiss-Ladis ☆☆☆☆
18th January 2009 permanent link
| Times visited: | once |
| Last visited: | January 2009 (yesterday) |
| Rating: | Very Good |
Serfaus-Fiss-Ladis is a huge area of ski lifts linking three villages in the western Tirol. By Austrian non-glacier standards it’s high - 1,400 to 2,800 metres. Great high mountain scenery, very good snow at the moment.
I suspect this would be great place for advanced skiers. There are lots of black runs, and boy are they harder than the ones in Gasteinertal. I tried one, the Fiss-Ladis “Directissima”, but I should have listened to the guy in the lift who said it was really steep. It’s really steep. I lost my nerve and blew my second or third turn, and slid a long way on my back, wondering when I was going to stop and feeling very happy that I was wearing the helmet my wife bought me for my birthday last year.
Wear a helmet, folks.
After this I felt no further need to prove my manhood by embarrassing and scaring myself on other runs with names like “Vertical” or “Kamikaze”. Instead I spent the rest of my day cruising around enjoying myself on nice, mellow red and blue runs and looking for bits of powder between them.
I went to Ladis by bus on a day trip from Munich organised by my employer’s company sports club. Lots of companies in Munich do these in the winter, and it’s an interesting option. If you only want to go to the mountains for a day, there’s a lot to be said for somebody else doing the four hours driving while you snooze or admire the scenery. Especially in the inevitable autobahn traffic jam on the way back when you’re tired. On the other hand: these buses leave very early in the morning. I like getting the early ski lifts and having the slopes to myself for an hour – my son and I had a great boys’ private mountain one morning last week in Bad Gastein – but persuading my wife to get out of bed at 4:30 just to go skiing turned out to be unfeasible.
related entries: Snowboarding
austrian snow conditions
17th January 2009 permanent link
Warmer weather and light falls of new snow have dramatically improved conditions in the Austrian Alps.
Temperatures are now a bit a bit below freezing in the valleys, about ten degrees (celsius) on average warmer than a week ago. On-piste snow is a lot more mellow and pleasant as a result.
Off-piste there’s enough fresh snow to be enjoyably boardable. Dream powder it’s not by any stretch of the imagination; floating through a couple of powder turns, then hitting a stretch of old bumpy snow lurking underneath, is the order of the day. But that’s ok: as the great rock climber Ron Fawcett said, “if you’re not falling, you’re not learning”. And after a week of nothing but increasingly cement-like pistes, I was delighted to get the season’s first couple of runs in on the proper stuff.
See also the excruciatingly detailed report and analysis on snow-forecast.com.
related entries: Snowboarding
St. Johann im Tirol ☆☆
16th January 2009 permanent link
| Times visited: | five or six |
| Last visited: | March 2001 |
| Rating: | Decent, worth a visit |
St. Johann im Tirol is the place where I learned to snowboard. I have fond memories of it for that reason, and it's an ok, beginner-friendly place, but it’s not really that great.
There are a couple of decent blue runs from the middle lift station. Quite long, attractive and interesting but not too difficult. (Although one of them is quite steep at the bottom, which alarmed me when I walked out of the carpark to the lift on my first day – “I’m not going to have to go down there am I?” Er …) These are where I learned to snowboard: my friends sneered at nursery slopes. And there are a few red runs, and one black that I never did.
The ski area at St Johann is low down, west-facing and catches plenty of sun. This can be very pleasant when it’s cold and snowy, but it also means snow conditions can be unreliable. I boarded there on grass and gravel on Boxing Day 2000, and tore my board up something rotten. (Fortunately I broke that snowboard completely a few weeks later in an embarrassing collision with a building at Kitzbühel, so I could go out and buy a new one.) St. Johann is also the only place I have ever snowboarded in the rain, a most unpleasant experience that I have no intention of ever repeating.
Local tip: don’t stay in St. Johann itself, stay in the nearby village of Gasteig. Gasteig is right at the foot of the spectacular Kaisergebirge mountains. Behind the hotel there’s a shed where you can rent a sledge, and either walk a couple of miles or get yourself and your friends towed up the mountain by tractor to an alm (mountain pub). From here, having relaxed sufficiently, you return to the valley via a toboggan run. Americans think Europe is stifled by over-regulation and bureaucracy, but I can’t even begin to imagine an American ski resort’s liability insurance allowing this sort of thing. Austrians on the other hand are very clear on the inalienable human right to throw oneself down mountains in whatever way one sees fit. It is after all the basis of their economy.
related entries: Snowboarding
Spitzingsee ☆☆
15th January 2009 permanent link
| Times visited: | twice |
| Last visited: | December 2008 |
| Rating: | Decent, worth a visit |
Spitzingsee is an attractive and easily accessible mountain area right on Munich’s doorstep. Consequently I’ve been there quite a few times hiking, mountain biking and sledging. Once for a full moon snowshoe hike, which was a magical experience. Snow glitters in moonlight. The mountains aren’t very high – about 1,600 metres – but for some reason there’s often plenty of snow here when there’s hardly any in the surrounding area. So there’s also skiing.
view from the Rotwand, near Spitzingsee
The ski area isn’t huge, and much of the lift system isn’t up to Austrian standards, but still there are some enjoyable and worthwhile runs. It wouldn’t be a good place for complete beginners, but a couple of the “red” runs are really easy. My family had a good time when I took them there with only one week’s skiing experience. Both my snowboarding days at Spitzingsee were family days out, but it looks like there would be plenty of more challenging stuff to do. Board The World was impressed and has some insider tips.
Don’t, however: decide to go to Spitzingsee at short notice on a Sunday in December when the weather and the early season snow are both unexpectedly good. Well, maybe do: the snow might well be good and you might have a pleasant start to your season. Just try not to be too surprised or disappointed that half of Munich made exactly the same decision you did and the morning lift queues are horrendous.
related entries: Snowboarding
Waidring / Steinplatte ☆☆☆
14th January 2009 permanent link
| Times visited: | four or five |
| Last visited: | March 2008 |
| Rating: | Good |
Very good place for beginners. I liked Waidring when I was a beginner snowboarder; my family loved it when I took them there as beginner skiers last year.
Lots of wide, pleasant blue runs served by fast modern chairlifts. Some, albeit limited, possibilities for the more experienced & ambitious: a couple of ok red runs, one solitary steep black run from the top of the mountain, some short but sweet off-piste opportunities dropping down into the valley to the left (west) of the main slopes if there’s powder.
The Steinplatte mountain isn’t very high, about 1,800 metres, but it’s a north facing bowl that often holds much better snow than other resorts at similar height in the region.
Steinplatte is on the Austrian/German border. Waidring village is on the Austrian side, and has access to the mountain via a cable car up some spectacular cliffs. The ski area is also reachable from the village of Reit im Winkl on the German side. Reit im Winkl is a pleasant little place, and a major centre for cross-country skiing, but access to Steinplatte is via a bus ride and then a long drag lift, not particularly recommended for snowboarders. I prefer to drive the extra half an hour to the Austrian side.
related entries: Snowboarding
Kitzbüheler Horn ☆☆
14th January 2009 permanent link
| Times visited: | once or twice |
| Last visited: | March 2001 |
| Rating: | Decent, worth a visit |
Kitzbüheler Horn is the light side of Kitzbühel.
It’s on a separate mountain the other side of the valley from the rest of the Kitzbühel ski area. Actually the same mountain as St. Johann im Tirol; the summit of the Kitzbüheler Horn is a couple of hundred metres directly above the top lift station of St. Johann – although it’s a couple of hundred metres of what looks like it would be pretty rocky, extreme and unpleasant off-piste.
The pisted runs are ok. There’s a permanent ski slalom course, on which I discovered that a skier’s racing line is next to impossible to follow on a snowboard, and a boardercross course that I didn’t bother with. Tricks are for kids. (Besides, it looked far too difficult). The real gem of the Kitzbüheler Horn for snowboarders is hidden, though: over the back of the mountain there’s a single pisted run down a long north east facing valley. The entire valley was full of glorious powder snow when I was there; friends who go there regularly tell me that it often is.
related entries: Snowboarding
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
Sportgastein ☆☆
13th January 2009 permanent link
| Times visited: | once |
| Last visited: | January 2009 |
| Rating: | decent |
Sportgastein is supposed to be the Gastein valley’s “high mountain” resort with the most reliable snow conditions (although it’s only three hundred metres higher than the Hohe Scharte at Bad Hofgastein)
Small ski area: one lift, with a couple of runs each side. Pleasant open red pistes above the middle stations; short but steep black runs below the middle station, that I found icy and difficult in current conditions.
Half hour bus ride from Bad Gastein through the narrow, wild and spectacular upper Gastein valley.
Here’s an informative roundup of the different Gasteinertal ski areas, by somebody who clearly knows the region far better than I do.
related entries: Snowboarding
austrian snow conditions
12th January 2009 permanent link
Just back from a week’s holiday in Gasteinertal in Austria, and prior to that over Christmas was in two other resorts in two different parts of the Austrian alps and – on the north side of the Alps anyway – it seems to be pretty much the same everywhere. The local papers and various websites I’ve read are talking about the best early-season snow in years. For all I know it might well be – it's certainly far better than some previous attempts I’ve made at Christmas / New Year grassboarding – but with some major caveats.
Namely: it has barely actually snowed since before Christmas. It has been cold, so the snow from before Christmas is still lying, but it’s old and hard now. The light dusting of new snow that Austrian radio was forecasting for the middle of last week showed no sign of materialising.
On-piste above about a thousand metres was good pretty much everywhere up to a week or so ago, but in most places is getting pretty compact and hard now. Lots of places are pleasant enough in the middle of the day and in the sun, a lot less so early or late in the day and in the shade. (This from the perspective of a snowboarder on holiday with two skiing beginners. I imagine the conditions might well be great for advanced piste skiers, but don’t take my opinion too seriously on a subject I neither know nor care about.) Easily accessible off-piste everywhere is tracked out, hard and not worth bothering with until there’s another big dump of fresh snow. Valley runs below a thousand metres are generally not much fun, for various reasons (see my separate area reports).
On the south side of the Alps it may be different: I seem to recall snow-forecast.com saying the best conditions so far are in the south-western French and Italian Alps.
related entries: Snowboarding
Dorfgastein / Grossarl ☆☆☆
11th January 2009 permanent link
| Times visited: | four |
| Last visited: | today (January 2009) |
| Rating: | Good |
Pleasant little ski area: the most gemütlich in the Gastein valley. It’s small, seems to be generally quieter than the other ski areas in the valley, and it’s a little lower, with trees almost to the top of the mountain. This is (a) pretty and (b) provides shelter from the wind, with the result that the best of the remaining pre-Christmas natural snow in the area is here, especially on the Großarl side. A pleasant contrast to Bad Gastein, which is only a couple of hundred metres higher but has bleak, treeless upper slopes where most of the natural snow has blown away and even the artificial snow on the pistes is thin.
The Dorfgastein side of the mountain faces west and Großarl on the other side of the mountain faces east, so it’s possible to stay in the sun for much of the day. Both sides are pleasant: a slight drawback is that the connection from Dorfgastein to Großarl is only possible via red runs or a short walk, so tricky for beginners & small children. Good snow down as far as the middle stations on both sides. Very little natural snow below: cold enough for there to be plenty of artificial snow on the pistes but it’s very hard and unpleasant going, and otherwise the west-facing slopes are bare below a thousand metres.
Several pleasant red runs through pretty forested mountain scenery. Only one blue run on the Dorfgastein side but it, too is long and interesting and my family loved it. One short and straightforward black run, which I am fond of as it is the scene of my only ever overtaking of a skier on a black run.
related entries: Snowboarding
Bad Hofgastein ☆☆☆☆
9th January 2009 permanent link
| Times visited: | four |
| Last visited: | January 2009 |
| Rating: | Very good |
End of a week's family holiday in Bad Hofgastein. The local mountain, Schossalm / Hohe Scharte, is a very good ski area. Good snow at the moment, especially higher up – the mountain is a concave bowl, and so seems to have held the snow better than the neighbouring Stubnerkogel. The slopes seem to get more sunshine too. Spectacular high mountain scenery.
Big area, lots to do, especially long & challenging red runs – the Hohe Scharte Nord, allegedly the longest pisted run in the eastern Alps, is way more interesting than the similar-length valley run at Stubai, and passes through some spectacular scenery at the top. Looks like there would be lots of good off-piste given a decent fall of snow. Family-friendly blue runs below the treeline are mostly Skiwege (forest roads in summer), not ideal for snowboarding but mostly wide enough, and good enough snow, to be ok. My two not-quite-beginner-any-more skiers like them.
The valley run to Bad Hofgastein village, though, is a scraped-bare icy nightmare in its lower reaches. Don’t bother until it snows again.
Lots of Russians – not just my two – here this week (Orthodox Christmas on Tuesday), but generally not too crowded as most of the New Year’s week Germans, Brits and Dutch have gone home.
related entries: Snowboarding
Zauchensee ☆☆☆☆
8th January 2009 permanent link
| Times visited: | twice |
| Last visited: | today (January 2009) |
| Rating: | Very good |
Zauchensee is quite high by Austrian non-glacier standards, 1350 to 2200 metres, and a north-facing bowl at the head of its valley, so should be pretty reliable for snow. Snow was certainly good when we were there last Easter (but then snow was good everywhere in Austria last Easter). There are three main lifts. Two of them offer longish, interesting and family-friendly blue runs, but the runs down from the highest lift, the Gamskogel, are too long and difficult for a four year old.
My days at Zauchensee were family outings, but there looks to be lots of off-piste potential for real boarders. My ex-colleague Scott, a far more experienced boarder than I am, raved about it. These Finnish guys were impressed too.
related entries: Snowboarding
Kleinarl / Flachauwinkel ☆☆☆
8th January 2009 permanent link
| Times visited: | once |
| Last visited: | today (January 2009) |
| Rating: | Good |
Small but charming ski area in between the larger resorts of Wagrain, Flachau and Zauchensee, with a lift connection to Zauchensee. We visited it as the start and end of a multi-mountain family ski adventure, Kleinarl-Flachauwinkel-Zauchensee and back, so were more concerned with making progress than taking our time and looking around, but were charmed and impressed nevertheless.
Also impressed that my five year old son, at the end of his second ever week of ski school, finished a day out, there and back over three mountains, crying because the lifts were closed, complaining that his parents ski/snowboard like lahme Schnecken (lame snails: true), and clamouring to do more.
Very pretty forested mountain scenery, good on-piste snow at the moment. Off-piste (as everywhere else in the area currently) old, hard and tracked out; but it looks like there would be loads to play with after a decent snowfall. Not many pisted runs, but certainly enough to be interested for a couple of days, and it’s on the same lift pass as the surrounding bigger resorts. The Flachauwinkel side is east-facing and Kleinarl is west-facing, so it’s possible to ski in the sun morning and afternoon. The Flachauwinkel side is quite easy-angled, which means the family-friendly blue runs are wide open slopes, a lot more pleasant and interesting than the narrow and boring Skiwege that tend to dominate the blue runs on the bigger and steeper mountains hereabouts.
Highly recommended area for beginner and family skiers. Looks like it would be great fun for snowboarding given decent off-piste snow conditions. Probably not much here for advanced skiers (despite Flachauwinkel being the home of downhill legend Hermann Maier) but I don’t care about that.
related entries: Snowboarding
Bad Gastein ☆☆☆☆
7th January 2009 permanent link
| Times visited: | three |
| Last visited: | today (January 2009) |
| Rating: | Very good |
Nice mountain – long, interesting runs, beautiful scenery. Lift connection (brand new, apparently) via Angertal to the next village/mountain, Bad Hofgastein/Schlossalm, so loads of possibilities.
Bad Gastein is an object lesson in how the details of local geography affect snow conditions, and why it is therefore not a good idea to take generalisations about conditions in an entire mountain range, country or even valley too literally. Bad Gastein’s mountain, the Stubnerkogel, has a dome-shaped summit significantly above the tree line. The snowfall from before Christmas has had no freeze-thaw cycle to consolidate in the last couple of weeks of cold, dry weather, and much of it has just blown away from the exposed slopes. At the top and on the east slopes facing the town of Bad Gastein, what snow there is is good, but it’s getting thin and stony in a lot of places. Another decent snowfall desperately needed, but there’s no sign of one. The more sheltered runs down in the trees on the north side (Angertal) are still excellent.
Bad Gastein itself is a curious town. A nineteenth century spa resort that long pre-dates skiing as a mass tourism industry, it is situated around hot springs right where the wild and narrow upper Gastein valley drops into the wider and friendlier lower valley. Big old hotels perched on the edge of the chasm, and a railway station. Brighton in a gorge.
The apres-ski party scene is not something my five year old son and I generally do much of, so don’t expect to read recommendations in this blog on a regular basis. We did, however, like the Silver Bullet in Bad Gastein.
related entries: Snowboarding
Söll ☆
2nd January 2009 permanent link
| Times visited: | once |
| Last visited: | December 2008 |
| Rating: | Don’t bother |
Getting close to current snow conditions reports now. Last Sunday, anyway, and it hasn’t snowed significantly since.
“Don’t bother” for families with beginners and/or small children. Might be good for more proficient skiers – decent looking red and black slopes on the Hohe Salve.
Söll is part of “Skiwelt” (Ski World), Austria’s largest (but low-lying) interconnected lift area. We went there because it is the first village one reaches in the Skiwelt coming from the Autobahn. Mistake. Dark, cold north-facing slopes. Crowded: big queues for the lift to the one and only (short) easy, sunny blue slope. Connection to the better-looking other parts of Skiwelt only via red slopes unsuitable for beginners and small children.
Old, hard snow but good enough on most of the pistes higher up, although some valley runs still closed because not enough snow has fallen yet.
related entries: Snowboarding
Hoher Bogen ☆
2nd January 2009 permanent link
| Times visited: | once |
| Last visited: | January 2008 |
| Rating: | Don’t bother |
Tiny, obscure ski resort in the Bavarian Forest.
“Don’t bother” is a little harsh. Hoher Bogen is certainly not worth travelling to as a ski destination, but if you happen to find yourself in the area for other reasons, given decent snow there’s a pleasant enough half day to be had there. Although the Grosser Arber nearby looks much better.
There are plenty of other reasons to be in the Bavarian Forest, which is generally an interesting and attractive region. I’ve already mentioned some other interesting and quirky things there, in addition to which I highly recommend the zoo at Lohberg, focused on the native animals of central European forests and mountains. And the pub opposite the zoo, which doesn’t look much but turns out to be friendly and with excellent food and beer – together with generally the fact that the Bavarian Forest is one of the remaining areas of traditional rural Bavaria where almost every village has its own excellent local brewery.
related entries: Snowboarding
Hintertux Glacier ☆☆☆☆☆
1st January 2009 permanent link
| Times visited: | three or four |
| Last visited: | February 2001 |
| Rating: | Fantastic |
Hintertux is the best place I have snowboarded.
Compared to Stubai Glacier in the next valley over, Hintertux has generally steeper and more challenging pistes, plus similarly limitless off-piste opportunities.
In bad weather it can get very bleak indeed up on the glacier, in which case the run down through the trees from the middle to the bottom gondola station offers some respite. And being first down the other valley run, the “schwarze Pfanne”, in a metre of fresh powder the morning after a big storm, is my finest snowboard experience ever to date.
3250 metres is quite high up. Expect a headache if you get the lift straight up to the top first thing in the morning without acclimatising. I find the discomfort goes away after the first couple of runs, but ymmv: reactions to altitude seem to be a very individual thing that has little do do with fitness or experience.
related entries: Snowboarding
Stubai Glacier ☆☆☆☆
1st January 2009 permanent link
| Times visited: | three or four |
| Last visited: | March 2001 |
| Rating: | Very good |
I generally like glacier boarding - I like the high mountain atmosphere and scenery. I know some other people find it bleak and prefer to be down in the trees where it’s prettier. Each to his own.
Stubai has a lot going for it: it’s big, it’s high up and therefore has totally reliable snow conditions. It’s near Innsbruck and easy to get to, but since the area is huge I’ve never found it overly crowded or had a problem with lift queues. There are miles of straightforward blue runs, with a few steeper bits and plenty of interesting off-piste possibilities in between. There is a run all the way down from the highest lift station at 3210 metres to the car park at 1750 metres. It’s not the greatest run I’ve ever done, but at 10 kilometres and 1500 metres of descent it’s certainly the most tiring and quite an experience.
You’d be foolish to go to Stubai – or any other glacier – in the depths of winter when there’s good snow lower down. Snow-forecast.com thinks it's going to be minus 33 (Celsius) at the top of Stubai on Saturday afternoon. Minus 46, taking windchill into account. I suspect they’re exaggerating somewhat: according to Stubai’s own website it’s minus 10 at the moment, and the generally totally reliable Austrian radio mountain weather forecast (click on “Bergwetter”) is predicting minus 14 at 3000 metres on Saturday. But still: the top lift station at Stubai is situated in a little pass where the wind howls through. A friend of mine said he was up there in December once, and it really was a matter of doing your bindings up as quickly as possible without taking your gloves off, then getting the hell out of there and off down the hill before you lost any vital body parts to frostbite.
related entries: Snowboarding
alan’s snowboarding blog
1st January 2009 permanent link
I am a middle-aged beginner-to-intermediate snowboarder with three seasons experience. I like venturing off-piste into the powder and would like to do some backcountry touring sometime. I have no interest whatsoever in throwing myself off cliffs or leaping around turning somersaults: tricks are for kids.
Based on that, I plan to offer my assessments of ski resorts I’ve been to in Austria and Germany, in the hope that they might provide somebody with some useful information. I’ll start with places I’ve been to in the past, but on Saturday I’m heading down to Austria for a week, and might hopefully be able to offer slightly more realtime reports on snow conditions. My assessments are mostly only based on a few visits to each resort – although I do probably go to the Alps more frequently, and to more different resorts, than most English-speaking snowboarders or skiers ever do. Especially if I’ve only been somewhere once, please assume that my rating is heavily biased by whether the snow there happened to be good or bad that day.
I have had, so far, two brief snowboarding careers. The first was in the winters of 2000 and 2001, when I had just moved to Munich and was learning to snowboard with a bunch of friends who were mostly only a season or so ahead of me in experience. We were doubtless nowhere near as capable as we thought we were, but we weren’t afraid to try going more or less anywhere on the mountain, and I tried enough off-piste to clearly understand that powder snow is where it’s at on a snowboard. Most of those friends have since moved on. I spent the winter of 2002 in India, then in 2003 I was an expectant father. So that was it for snowboarding for a few years. Sledging became the dominant winter sport in our household.
Last winter my son was coming up to his fifth birthday, which by Bavarian standards meant it was definitely high time to get him on skis. My wife wanted to learn too, and friends who are very experienced skiers and have a son the same age asked if we fancied a week in the Alps with them in February. We did, and it was great. So with excellent late season snow last year and excellent early season snow this year, I’m just heading into the second season of my second snowboarding career.
So my perspective is that of a former incompetent-but-enthusiastic freerider, who is now mainly concerned with finding unstressful slopes for his wife and child while still hoping to be able to nip off into the powder for a little while now and again. People with other perspectives and priorities might rate places differently. I will rate things, based on my personal experience of them, as follows:
| ☆ | One star: | don’t bother |
| ☆☆ | Two stars: | decent, worth a visit |
| ☆☆☆ | Three stars: | good |
| ☆☆☆☆ | Four stars: | very good |
| ☆☆☆☆☆ | Five stars: | fantastic |
There are plenty of websites out there that try to rate ski resorts comprehensively, objectively and/but in a manner that is by some criteria “fair” and/or unlikely to offend advertisers. This results in an atmosphere in which is is politically unacceptable to dislike famous major resorts like, for example, Kitzbühel, and general rating inflation in which nothing is ever rated under three stars out of five (not unlike ebay seller ratings, where you can essentially subtract the first 95% of the rating to get a realistic opinion). I on the other hand have no problem at all with disliking Kitzbühel, for reasons I will explain in due course.
But for reference, some of the better trying-to-be-comprehensive-and-objective ski resort review websites, that I use heavily when I’m trying to decide where to go next, are:
Ski Resort Test: English language version of a German site, Ski Gebiete test. Useful detailed ratings for different levels of ability. Reasonably comprehensive for Germany and Austria, much less so elsewhere.
Snow Forecast attempts to give comprehensive reports on snow conditions
… and, much less comprehensive but with a more hardcore snowboarder perspective:
Board The World
World Snowboarding Guide
related entries: Snowboarding
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