Österreichische Alpen II

I couldn't leave well enough alone, and so I went back to Innsbruck on Friday. I skipped the hotel reservation, otherwise the formula was the same.



I felt I should try to branch out and see if Stubai Glacier was an anomaly of ridiculous greatness in the Innsbruck area or not. Looking at the area ski map, it did look the best, but I decided to check out an area called Kuhtai which also looked pretty respectable. The bus ride was longer, and when I got there, conditions were a little different than at Stubai the previous weekend.



I really can't make an objective judgment on the place. There were no views. It was raining, sleeting, or hailing, depending on one's elevation, all day. It was the stickiest snow I've ever skied on, and it alternated between feeling like you were skiing on a wet shag carpet and half-dried rubber cement. Only the steepest trails were suffcient to overcome the anomalously-high coefficient of friction of this stuff. Could this be related to their mysterious upside-down cow logo?



The bus ride home was nearly infinitely long and in an incident whose details aren't fit for Deutscher Bob publication, I likely left my practically-new ice climbing gloves on the bus; At any rate, I don't have them anymore. I got lucky in that the next day I was able to survive without them with almost no discomfort.

In an affront to my recently developed perception that crowds and lines aren't an issue in the Alps, I had to wait in mob when I arrived back at Stubai Glacier on Sunday.



The day improved drastically from there, though. The lines worked themselves out, the clouds became sparse, and contrary to my expectations, the snow conditions were excellent once again.



My skiing continued to improve, with some runs being better than others.



I was pretty comfortable skiing any trail on the mountain when I came across the start to Route 13.



High alpin Piste? Skilled skier? Alpine experience? All punctuated with an exclamation point? It's simply not in my nature to resist an invitation like that.

The route diverged well skier's right to any of the normal trails, and it really did have an alpine feel to it. It was a little taste of ski mountaineering without any of that pesky uphill part. It took some work, and a touch of survival skiing to get down, but I managed it with no unsavory incidents.