find a short edit about our recent campervan trip to the tauplitz in styria, austria, here 🙂
A road trip to the west of Austria – searching for the powder at the end of the old year
This entry might be an anti-thesis to Stephi’s strategy to deal with the lack of snow. I went and searched for the beloved white stuff. It was a long way to get there, but lucky as I was I had good company in the person of Mikaela Hollsten, a good friend and impressive snowboarder. Not everything worked out easy on this tip sharing the car with (nice) strangers, full slopes because of the Christmas holidays, struggles to find accommodation and endless hikes to get to untracked powder fields. Still, for me it totally payed off. I just need to be up high in the mountains every now and then, just surrounded by snow and rocks after an exhausting hike, watching the jackdaws circling in the air….
This is a hard winter. Maybe those climatic circumstances are not even worth calling winter. Most of the Alps are brownish green up to high altitudes. Be it climate change, which would be very bad, or bad luck, which is not much better, there are ways to escape into the white.
So, what does one do, when one is already craving for powder? You go and search for it, check webcams and data from weather stations and then pick out the spots with the thickest potential snow layer. It would be best to explore the spots with local knowledge. As I’m definitely no native to the west of Austria, I had to try it without local knowledge, but with a good friend, who is always up for any kind of adventure: Mikaela Hollsten. For five days we shared our passion, hunted the powder, took pictures and escaped daily life.
Ursprünglichen Post anzeigen 499 weitere Wörter
go with the flow!
read about my strategy to survive the emotional rollercoaster that is a snow-less winter 😉
Splitboard Article in Volume Magazine
an article by Roman and myself about splitboarding recently got published in the austrian music magazine Volume as part of their Freeride Special.
Open Faces Obergurgl/Hochgurgl and Austrian Freeride Master – contest no. 6
Happiness is ruling the world!
I couldn’t be happier. I won the FWQ**** in Obergurgl/Hochgurg and I’m Austrian Freeride Master, that’s a pretty cool title, which will help to excuse the high number of gap years in my CV;)
my line
The face in Hochgugl/Obergurgl the ‚Hangerer‘, is extremely steep and rocky, a perfect, technical face. It’s bigger than it seems and very hard to orientate as it’s rolling in the top part. From the start gate and also during the hike up, one can’t really check the line. This leads to a very exciting atmosphere at the start, I never felt that nervous before, and even some minutes before the start I wasn’t really sure if I would actually find my line and if there would be still snow in it.
So it was an interesting situation, because I had to trust in my capabilities I acquired over the years.
The Face check took…
Ursprünglichen Post anzeigen 534 weitere Wörter
searching for gratification- tails of an adventure around the corner_1
Dreaming of winter, while there is actually powder and I’m bound to Vienna….the second part will be written soon….
22nd to 26th of February 2014
Just around the corner of my homespot, there are some huts from the Austrian
Alpenverein
(alpine association) in the backcountry. A couple of them have a winter room(Winterraum), where one can stay for a few days. Some of those rooms have a stove, others not, some may have wood, others not. That’s what you have to figure out, when you get the key from the person running the hut in summer. The one we went for had a stove but no wood.
We decided to bring up wood, 30kg, to be precisely, stored on sledges which we would fix to our backpacks. That lead to an awfully exhausting ascent, where we barely made it into the winterroom of the hut before darkness. After approximately 15km and 900m of altitude the hot tea from the first melted water tasted better than whiskey.
working hard on…
Ursprünglichen Post anzeigen 250 weitere Wörter
„…you haven’t got a snowballs chance in hell!“
CERRO TORRE
… (Jim Bridwell, 1979, american rock climber and mountaineer)
Well, strong words of a man that has pushed the standards in climbing ever since. Outstanding climbing talent David Lama seemed to seek for challenges like this and ignored all the horror stories of the legendary mountain CERRO TORRE located in Patagonia, Argentina and known for its steepness and human abysses.
Ursprünglichen Post anzeigen 132 weitere Wörter
Rodeo – up and down the Lahningries
Lahningries, Schneeberg, Austria
Sooo… folks…what you can’t see here you have to imagine!
After a very sporty weekend – I started the spring season on my racing cycle and trained for the half marathon – I began to miss the mountains and therefore went on a splitboard tour with my shred buddy.
Ursprünglichen Post anzeigen 458 weitere Wörter
3 days at the guttenberghaus winter shelter room.
we had a special time at the winter shelter room, read my report on my blog!
FWQ** Open Faces Freeride Contest Kappl
survived yet another contest 😉
placed 4th at fwq** in kappl – read the full report on my blog.
p.i.e. - powder in the east 