I did want to post this before new years but, as I’m back in Innsbruck we were to busy riding and having fun so better late then never 😛
Well here we were at the last day of our three day trip. The girls had to learn, and dudes were off. We got up early, checking the situation, thinking that with the new 20 cm of fresh powder from yesterday, we would be heading into Sölden to ride the lines, we had scouted on the first day. After checking the situation it turned out, that we would have to go further to the west. So after picking up Aljosa and David, we were off to pay a visit to our dear old friend Pavli, who works at FISS for the winter season, teaching people to ski and snowboard, when he’s not hunting local powder. Since I haven’t been to the resort before, it would also be great to have a local along. The avalanche situation in the resort had been kind of messed up from the previous week, so we would have to be very careful.
A few days before coming to Innsbruck a Chech freeskier died from an avalanche at the same place, and as we were about to learn from Pavli, even the ski instructors weren`t safe. The avalanche scale was forecasting level III for the area, but that should not be underestimated. In the meantime in France the level had gone up to 5, which equals a natural disaster.
Powpow 🙂
Our merry band of missfits !
The first part of the day. Just up there the avalanche buried
the chech guy !
Smile for the netcam XD
When we arrived at the resort, the sun was already out, and it was time to find some powder. We did a few warmup runs on the southern side of the resort. The powder was nice and fluffy and like at Kühtai there were about 20 cm of it. Unfortunately we weren’t the only people seeking powder, which meant that the side was tracked quickly. After three runs, we decided to check the more risky northern side.
Luckly the skiinsturctor stayed unharmed.
Head for the trees! Its fluffy and u scare rabbits !
While passing from one of the cable cars to another, the day before, the ski instructors had triggered an avalanche that partially buried one of them. Pavli showed us the spot and it wasn’t pretty. Apparently, the upper snow layer, was badly connected to the lower base. The bad part of it was, that the upper snow layer was around 30 to 40 cm thick and heavy. On top of that we had the freshies from yesterday. Not a stable snowpack at all. Another thing that had happened, and was working to our advantage in the end, was the wind. It had been so strong that it had blown vast amounts of the snow into the lower Woods. That meant that we were going to head for the trees. Since access, to the left-leaning side of the tree line meant that you had to cross a few blown over stones nobody went there. Good for us. It meant that we had the entire left flank of the tree line to ourselves. Check this one out in in the video.
I so want one of these. But 90 bucks … come on 😛
After a few nice runs, we also had to visit one of Aljosas and Pavlis lady friends, who was working in one of the local resort restaurant. Of course before that, we had to check out the funparks airbag, or at least Aljo did XD.
Its supposed to be a backflip.
And so we end up in the most expensive restaurant on
the mountain …
After lunch, we did a few more lines, in our little tree haven and then gradually headed back to Innsbruck, to spend another four hours in the car returning to Ljubljana. All in all, on that day, according to skiline.cc we did around 8800 vertical metres, which was quite awesome and quite exhausting. And there is TONs of terrain left to track ! Also on a sidenote I upgraded to a GoPro 3 Black so expect some better quality from my pow shots in the future XD
