Teil Zwei: Deutschland!: March 2010

For ski break this year I headed down to Austria with a bunch of friends. We rented a big, cozy house in the village of Lungotz, about an hour south of Salzburg...and snowboarded our brains out.

The best deal around was the Salzburg Super Ski Card which enabled the rider to ski at any of the hills in the Salzburg area - we had a map with a long list of spots and spent a good bit of time weighing our options - "Krippenstein tomorrow, or Flachauwinkl?" We mostly rode at Obertauern because the off-piste conditions were the best and it's a really pretty area. Also Dachstein West (Annaberg and Gosau), Krippenstein, and Flachauwinkl.

The view from the ski house - great cross country ski tracks crossed right infront of the house. I only used them a couple times, though - exhausted from snowboarding.

Our ski house in Lungotz (Felix's trusty van to the left got stuck in the snowbank one morning about 400m from the house - shoveling with our new avalanche shovels only sunk the tires deeper until the monster plow drove past and pulled us out)

Jayson gets ready to ride

Ryan in the Gondola

Agnes and Lea

Lunchbreak - me, Felix, Jayson, Agnes, and Richie. Sandwiches in the snow (1 cheese, 1 banana+peanutbutter)

Richie, me, and Felix

Due to a broken binding, Felix and I were separated from our friends and food this lunch break and had to resort to eating...brotchen and frozen nutella found in the back of the van! Hard times!

Have you ever had to chip nutella out of the jar with a spoon?

Richie and me at the best lunch spot of all on top of Flachauwinkl. There was a great off-piste area just down from here that we spent most of the afternoon exploring.

Felix and I also checked out Krippenstein which is supposed to be an off-piste paradise - 2 gondolas, one 11-km piste, and the rest is free riding. We unfortunately came after a few warm days (all but the last 2 days of the trip were warm, sunny, and sweaty) where all the powder was tracked up and crusted over. Our 2 rides down the mountain took 4 hours and involved butt-scooting down a luge track riddled with tree roots and a lengthy hike in search of the illusive non-crusty powder. Not my favorite. But great potential after a heavy snow.

Felix retrieves his board which took a solo side-trip into a hole (though, luckily, not over a cliff) in Krippenstein.

We took lunch after the 1st run in Krippenstein this day.

But after lunch and our 2nd run we were fed up and headed back to Dachstein West, homebase, and had a fantastic afternoon slush-riding on the almost-desterted pistes.