It snowed fairly hard last night here in the Austrian valley of the River Inn, so we headed south to the Zillertal region and drove the steep windy road to Hochfugen, a ski resort complex where you’ll also find a plethora of excellent moderately angled backcountry skiing terrain that works well with new snow and iffy weather. We got about a foot of new on a firm base. Excellent. Only thing lacking was the views, as clouds kept everything under wraps. Ho hum, another powder day for WildSnow…
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| Louie on Kraxentrager. This was the first mountain I skied in Europe several years ago during a Dynafit press visit. The snow during that first visit was terrible, and I was so jet lagged I could hardly ski. Somewhat embarassing to say that least. Nice to be up there today with good snow, ski legs and fine turns. |
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| Oh, forgot to mention that back at the Barthels they’ve got some traditional Tyrolean agriculture going on. Chickens with fresh eggs every day, and a stable of Tyrolean “berg schaf” (alpine goats). This is the billy of the bunch posing with his harem. |
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| Meanwhile, back on the Kraxentrager, below timberline you find a vast area of open timber. Beautiful. This comes about because nearly every square foot of land in the Tyrol is used for some form of agriculture and has been for hundreds (if not thousands) of years. Thus, while you’ll find areas of dense trees (that are still selectively logged), many areas remain thinned out so they provide pasture as well as lumber, with the side effect of good skiing.
Downside is that with so much skiable terrain, all you have to do install a cable car and you’ve got instant ski resort. So the industrial skiing tends to spread like “cancer,” as Manfred succinctly states it. I was under the impression that Europeans resisted such development more effectively, but apparently the resorts have dozens of ways of convincing the locals that yet another ski lift is worth installing. This is very unlike the western US, where we’ve got so much room and such strict opposition to new resorts, that I’ve always been rather laissez-faire about the occasional proposal for a new ski area as such actually happening in Colorado is as rare event as seeing a goony bird on the summit of Pikes Peak. |
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| Manfred and his hound Cato. |
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| At the summit, the ubiquitous cross you find at most highpoints in this area. This one is not huge like some, just a nice small wooden one with a good feeling. It’s not that cold today, but the humidity is high and the wind howling, so it still feels sub zero and we don’t hang around for long. Whatever happened to those sunny European fondu summit picnics they always show on the postcards? We’re still trying to make one of those happen. |
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| Another group coming up, perhaps searching for the fondu picnic or at least a pot of speckknoedel. As with many of the good touring areas around here, you’ll see plenty of people even on weekdays. There is indeed lots of room, but even snow the best powder lines get taken early. Sort of like the Utah Wasatch. |
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| Since we couldn’t find any Tyrolean gastronomic treats at the top of the mountain, stopping at a small gasthaus near the bottom was of course obligatory. I started with a raddler (beer and lemonade) and coffee, both which inevitably evolved to a nice plate of landjager and brot as presented above.
Later that evening we ended up at another excellent Tyrolean restaurant for dinner, actually an old farmhouse converted into a gasthaus/brewery a few years ago. Such as traditional setting was a nice situation for Louie to enjoy his first beer, so that special event in a man’s life capped of another fine day with the Barthels. Today we leave Austria and drive to Switzerland, Berner Oberland area. We’ll visit relatives there and hope to do some higher altitude ski tours if weather cooperates. We’ve got the skiing fairly down — now we’ll see how we do on the autobahn. Wish us luck! |
WildSnow.com publisher emeritus and founder Lou (Louis Dawson) has a 50+ years career in climbing, backcountry skiing and ski mountaineering. He was the first person in history to ski down all 54 Colorado 14,000-foot peaks, has authored numerous books about about backcountry skiing, and has skied from the summit of Denali in Alaska, North America’s highest mountain.
