We would be awfully bummed about moving away from Switzerland in the middle of ski-season… if we hadn’t moved to Munich. The oh-so-conveniently-located Austrian Alps are close enough for easy day-trip skiing. Unfortunately this season hasn’t been as snowy as we would like, but the Austrians seem to be pretty good at filling in the gaps with man-made snow.
There seem to be dozens of resorts to choose from. In January we hit Kaltenbach, and just yesterday we were in Alpbachtal. Kaltenbach had a nice variety of runs, and our enjoyment was greatly enhanced by a covey of skiing witches. Alpbachtal was a little short on the blue (easy) slopes, but I managed to stay entertained for the entire day (and conditions were even good enough for me to successfully navigate a couple red runs). We also enjoyed riding the charmingly antique single-chair lift.
While lift tickets seem to have comparable prices in Austria and Switzerland, equipment rental is noticeably cheaper in Austria (skiing pro that I am, naturally I own my own, but Scott is still renting until he finds a snowboard he can fall in love with that doesn’t have a wild west theme painted on it). From what I’ve seen, Switzerland has more ski areas that are easily reachable by train than Austria does. We’ve heard that Germany’s Garmisch is a quick and easy train ride away, but haven’t had the chance to try it out yet.
Years and years ago when I was in high school and a ski instructor on the weekends we used to ride the single chairlift at Ski Acres (now the “Summit Central” part of “The Summit at Snowqualmie”, just east of Seattle. It looked a bit like this chair picture in Wikipedia. We would sit sideways on the chair, just like the woman in this picture and shout up and down the chairlift at each other to have a conversation.
Great picture of the chairlift.
I love that picture! So elegant…
You’ve got a great blog here. There are photos of so many beautiful places. I’ll have a look at it again for sure!
Thanks, Juka. 🙂