Austrian Life Part I

Ashley and I are now two weeks into our next big phase of our Big Trip; that is, spending the winter in the ski capital of the world:  Austria!  I have been keen to write a blog post, but my little foldable keyboard somehow died and it took me a few days to acknowledge that and then several more to get another one.   

For our winter stay we chose Innsbruck; though it’s low elevation (2000 feet) the mountains soar 6000 feet straight up outta town on both sides, and they are burly!  The north side of the Inn River valley sports some huge limestone walls in the narrower parts, and super steep, long gullies and forested hillsides topping out in big cirques in the notso-narrow zones.  The south side of the valley is more broken up by long side valleys that lead to high mountains that contain a dozen ski resorts and – in this skinny section of Austria – the Italian border.   Innsbruck itself is a medium-sized city of >100,000 folks, and it definitely feels like a city, not a town.  Which is why we – as mostly city SLiCkers ourselves, decided to get a place on a creek in a small village called Axams, about 1400 feet higher on a plateau above town that has all that we need; a grocery store, pizza place, two bakeries, 20 minutes by bus to downtown, and importantly, good walkable access to skiing.  It’s a pretty spacious apartment that has a viable kitchen, indoor storage for our bikes, a washing machine, a TV that provides Youtube and Prime movies in English with only a little angst in figuring out, and  – importantly – space for folks to join us!  In short, it’s a fine little “home” for a while, which we got pretty keen for after 3 months of constant movement.  

We got excited about Innsbruck after rolling through here 3 ½ years ago on a bike tour, talking to friends about it, and realizing that it’s a pretty big crossroads of the Alps, with Brenner Pass heading over to Italy’s Dolomites to the south, the Austrian ski capital of St Anton and Switzerland to the west, the German Alps and easy airport of Munich to the north, and many more Austrian Alps to the east. And while it’s not necessarily known for its copious snow, the ski resorts are there for a reason, and there have been three drought years in a row, so the odds are good that this one will be good, right?

Not so much, unfortunately.  There was an impressive storm cycle that hammered most of the Alps pretty evenly in late November, but it’s basically been dry ever since….except for the SW Alps, which is currently experiencing its third drubbing of snow in three weeks, with over a meter of snow falling each time!  But as the latest storm rages in the West, it feels like Spring here.  You don’t have to be a big weather geek to get this:

But we knew that we would not be getting great snow; yes, Austria’s famous for its skiing and pretty much if you’re Austrian you’re a skier, so it does snow, but like New Englanders they’re quite good on ice and shit snow.  Additionally, global warming has been particularly hard on Europe.  And we didn’t choose to winter in the powder capital of Hokkaido! (where friends are slaying it as we speak)

And Ashley and I are accustomed to making the best of whatever we are given, so we’ve skied every day, with most of those consisting of skinning up resorts and then flying down the groomers.  It’s great that the Austrian resorts accommodate uphill traffic, and a great model for American resorts that love to find reasons to not allow it (even though they are usually operating under a Special Use Permit on public lands)

And while we aren’t necessarily resort skiers and have grown accustomed to only the “crowded” backcountry where there really aren’t that many people relative to resorts, I won’t deny that raging down a groomer at 40mph is pretty dang fun!  Most of the time the skin tracks are off to the side of the “piste” (ski run) and the groomers usually leave a small berm to separate skinners from skiers, but every once in a while you get “forced” onto or across a piste you feel a bit like a squirrel wriggling across as quickly as you can as missile skiers are firing down at you!  And we have gone off-piste a few times for a little bit above/adjacent to lifts/pistes, but it’s sketchy:  thin faceted snow over grass if you’re lucky, rocks if you’re not.  One fun aspect of the high pressure is that with bluebird days we are getting daily doses of huge mountain scenery; everywhere you look there’s some of the craggiest gnarlies peaks with incredible ski lines everywhere!  It looks like the Canadian Rockies of Banff; why drive a thousand miles for that when can fly five thousand miles for it?!!?  

Then there’s the rest of life:  how is it to be “settled” in Austria, or any other country?  Overall it’s been fine, though we have had to get used to never really knowing what’s going on.  When we are in SLC we – like everyone in their hometowns – are efficient:  we know the right routes to get to the right places to get the right things from the right people.  In a new place where you don’t know the language or the customs or the place, you have to be patient with the inefficiency associated with Life.  Of course, we were dealing with that in France, Spain, Morocco, and Italy too, but that’s a much simpler life of just riding, eating, and sleeping (that’s one of the beauties of bike touring!) and for some reason while being settled in one place provides a good base, I think it starts to create a mindset of “I gotta be efficient at Life!” that you kinda have to let go of and just laugh at how much dundering around you actually do!   

We have had a tiny bit of experience for about the first time with a Euro health care system; I had a plugged ear for three weeks and saw four different ENT docs – three in Italy with the last one here in Innsbruck; all were private practices with super nice docs and they charged me $0, $100, $50, and $27.  Ashley had a sinus infection that continued to linger and when we were in Flachau she went to a local clinic and got equally good care and a couple of tests for $150 (okay, they weren’t dollars, they were all in Euros, so a bit more…).  It’s pretty clear that I need ear surgery and I’m looking hard at getting it done here, not surprisingly…..

A highlight of our first coupla weeks here was going east a couple of hours to the small resort town of Flachau to watch the annual women’s World Cup slalom race.  Of course, this year is a bit different, because not only is Mikaela Shiffrin coming back from a bizarre injury over a year ago, but she had also won 5 of the 6 slaloms that had already happened; she’s been on a tear!  Despite being lifelong skiers, neither of us have been big ski racing fans; I think I can safely say that I haven’t seen an entire ski race since I was a kid.  But now, since Mikaela’s an American in a Euro-dominated sport that we very much sorta loosely do (who are we kidding; the only commonality is that we are sliding on skis…..not raging on bulletproof ice!) and I suppose it’s like going to a football game in America, which I’ve never done either!).  

It was super fun; we were able to  – of course – skin up a couple of runs at adjacent resorts, and the night before the race they had a celebrity ski race for charity sponsored by local hero Hermann Maier, the Herminator who dominated the speed events in the late 90’s to early 2000’s.

  They paired the ski celebrities with actual Austrian pop culture celebrities, and though I didn’t know hardly any of them, all the skiers were either Olympic, World Championship, or World Cup champions or silver medalists (if you’re a ski racing geek, here’s the list).   One I did know from watching ski racing as a kid was Franz Klammer, the icon who not only won five Hannenkam downhills among many others but also was immortalized by a goin’-for-broke run to win the 1976 Olympic downhill in Innsbruck over another Austrian, Bernard Russi, who was also in the celebrity challenge race!

  If you haven’t ever seen Klammer’s run, it’s worth 2 1/2 minutes:  https://youtu.be/bg4TGErNADk?si=28LRrJU_L1ndkl4m

So it was pretty fun and exciting to see him ski in person, and he still shreds at 76!  And for what it’s worth, he beat poor Bernard Russi again!  

The next night was the real show, and it was great:  12,000 screaming fans waving Austrian flags (provided by a local beer company with big logos on the backside; how would those fly in the stars and stripes-loving US of A?!) cheering on many of their own ladies and – to be fair to them – also cheering on the likes of Mikaela.  She did pull it out, but not by much and not ‘til literally the last second (slaloms are combined times of two runs, with the 2nd run list going backwards from the 30th place racer from the first run) and her American teammate Paula Moltzan was second, while an Austrian was third, much to the delight of the fans; they had that much more reason to celebrate by drinking that much more!  (methinks that pro sports viewing is pretty much the same around the globe:  a great excuse to drink a lot!   And in ski racing it makes for more excitement as drunk folks navigate their way up and down near the bottom of the steep, icy course!).  We met a nice couple from West Virginia who have come over for a couple of World Cup races every year for the last few years and they love it!  Apparently we liked it enough that we are going back east again this weekend to watch the famed Streif at the Hannenkahm; the downhill is sold out (45,000 tickets) so we’re watching the super G, which looks pretty much just as nutty….

Another reason that we chose Innsbruck is that of the many potential ski-oriented places in Europe, we actually know some folks in this area; Stefan is the brother of the Jamieson’s virtual son-in-law who’s an avid backcountry skier:

we were able to get together for “kaffee and kuchen” (coffee and cake); an afternoon tradition for Austrians with Linh Nguyen:

and it was Black Diamond’s EU director Jonathan who convinced us to stay in his hometown of Axams and was kind enough to let us ship our ski gear to him from the US and our camping gear from Morocco, and my long-ago Patagonia pal Roddy Darcy lives over near Kitzbuhel, whom we’ll visit when we are over there this week for the race.  

Ash has skate-skied 3 times, and I went once at Seefeld (and promptly broke a rental pole!); this is a legendary Nordic system that has something like 250km of trails (a small fraction of them are open now due to the low snow) and has hosted Olympic, World Cup, and World Championship events. 

Innsbruck  also has a world class rock gym that we’ve hit a couple of times

And some nice town stuff:

Overall we’ve had a blast, despite the drought.  And for sure, skinning a resort in the sunshine in big new mountains scouting out potential future tours is better than bumbling around in the fog getting avalanched; the multi-week drought followed by big storms has made the western Alps into an avy fest, killing a dozen people a week ago.  Weirdly, Austria had a terrible avalanche weekend with 8 fatalities, even though it hasn’t gotten any snow?  Even locals we’ve talked to don’t know what’s going on with those.  We are anticipating that when it does snow here the “base” of facets and ice is going to make for a challenging snowpack….

More later as the adventures stack up…even  if the snow does not!