Gambling again... When Krippenstein is closed head for the Trees !!!

Hiking back to the Zwieselalmbahn
Photo by Žiga Resman

Check and Ride:
Level 4
All mountain
All expositions
HIGH DANGER!

It was 5 am when I got myself out of bed and headed to pick up Jernej, the newest member of the jibbrothers team, a local bond of freeskiers from Slovenia. They also have a nice blog you can follow here. Skis in tow we headed to Bled to meet up with our vertical advantures friends. The plan was simple. Since the weather forcast for Austria was snow, snow and more snow we decided to head for Krippenstein in hopes of repeating and topping last weeks powder fantasy. We wanted to be there as early as possible. The ride took 3 hours and when we passed Spital it already started snowing. Regardless, we were making good time. Getting closer to Krippenstein the snowfall increased and we started getting a little worried. Mixed with a little rain and because of the odd weather conditions and a very high avalanche danger (See the check and Ride) we hoped to get to higher ground. Coming closer we saw a lot of cars returning. We thought… this must be a bad sign.

Žiga and Me getting ready to go
Photo by Rok Zalokar

And it was. Arriving at the bottom station of the Gondola we saw a few people getting ready with there trekking gear. After asking, we were told the obvious. No Kripping the Stain today.. the resort is closed. Disappointed we started thinking.. what do we do now. The gamble didn`t work out. After a few minutes I remembered that while heading to Saalbach last weekend we made a wrong turn and ended up at the end of the Gosau valley at Dachstein West. It had looked interesting so we decided to gamble again. The resort is about 1500-1800 m high so it`s rather low and covered in trees. Only the top is treeless and the back of the valley opens up the sights directly on to the Dachstein glacier.

When we got there we were puzzled. Looking to find some lines we started out easy and headed under the chairlifts. At the top the snow was good and there had been 15-20 cm of fresh. You could see cracks on open areas where the heavy snow had gone off in big plates. Avalanche danger after all was still extremely high with no signs of lowering as the day progressed.

Petra Brajnik turning powder with
a Durpaz board.

Rok Zalokar dropping in. Why did I not
take my 7D for this shot 😛

After a few initial easy runs to the other resort side we started looking for more demanding terrain. And boy were we in for a treat. First we found tons of nice lines under the gondola. Lots of variants, fields, drops, pillows that narrowed at a artificial lake. Wearing of to the right we got to some nice trees with tons of pillows. This is where rock shot this nice picture of me dropping a pillow cliffy:

Pillow drops are fun 🙂 Vertical advantures representing on the Elan skis 😛
Photo by Rok Zalokar

For the first person perspective check out the GoPro footage 🙂

The next run we decided to head out to the right from the gondola under a freight lift. In the middle of it we found a guy digging out a stranded cablecar. There was just to much snow for the poor old thing to pass:P It was good that we meet him because he was able to direct us away from the nasty cliff line that should be avoided if u don’t want to end up in truble. This run was indeed difficult. Low visibility, steep cliffy terrain, hard to navigate and even a few sinkholes made us happy to have made it down in one piece.

The Playground of the day – Dachstein West.
The nasty Terrain is in the left middle of the picture just above the big cliff.

After that, beeing completly soked, the weather cleared up and exposed a lot of unridden stuff to the right of the main lift so we enjoyed a few more runs. After that we ended the day at the Timeless Bar to meet up with Juša for a few nice drinks and later at the vertical advantures HQ at Bled some well earned Pizza thnx to Žiga.