Deutscher Bob

Monday, March 14, 2005

Österreichische Alpen

I took a train to Innsbruck, Austria on Friday evening. Orbitz botched my hotel reservation. Luckily I found another hotel for much cheaper nearby. From town, you can see large mountains in every direction. There are something like 7 ski areas immediately surrounding Innsbruck. On Saturday morning, I found out just in time that there was a free Skibus leaving from near my hotel at 8:45. The driver I talked to suggested Stubai Glacier, and told me to trust him that it was good. I did and it was.



This was going to be the first time I'd done any non-cross-country skiing since I tore my ACL. A year and two months since surgery, I was totally cleared for this type of activity. I was a bit tentative about it though.



I brought my telemark skis. I spent the morning doing some cautious, seriously-speed-shedding tele-turns. The great thing about this place is there are long, open, easy trails from every gondola, lift, and rope tow on the mountain. There's only a handful of groomed intermediate trails, and I don't recall seeing any expert trails at all. However, the whole ski area is above treeline, and there's nothing to stop you from skiing wherever you want (off cliffs, etc.)



After lunch, I gained a bit more confidence, and remembered both how to do an aggresive tele-turn and what the accompanying thigh burn feels like. I did a couple intermediate trails, and took the gondola back down to the Skibus for the 4:30 departure time.

It was too much fun to not do it again the next day, so I did. It was an even more beautiful day- not a cloud in the sky- and even better snow conditions. It seemed like they got a couple inches over night.





By the second afternoon, I had really remembered how to ski, and started using the chair lift rides up to scout cool routes off the groomed trails. It was really easy to find nice powder this way. There were plenty of routes like this that people were skiing that I wouldn't go near though. My favorite spot was a powdery slope off-piste on the back side of the mountain just below the coolest little chairlift. I did it several times.



Day two ended as perfectly as is possible. There is one ungroomed ski route below the top of lowest gondola which leads all the way back to the parking lot. It was pretty tricky to get down several sections of it. There were even some- gasp!- icy sections. I had to call on all my New England experience for that. At first, I wasn't sure if I was making a horrible mistake by taking the route (I wasn't 100% sure where it lead), but it turned out I was able to ski to within a couple of feet from my bus, where the driver was selling beer for 1 euro each. The bus even had bottle holders.



The train ride home was a bit long, but quite comfortable.

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