Delayed St Anton TR – 9-11 Feb + introducing new maggot

[horizon]

Ok I'm bummed that Mrs Horizon nixed my proposed trip to Alp D'Huez this last weekend. With Roo and Hayduke in, it would've been epic. So here's my TR from the previous weekend in St Anton. Not enough pics, but hey, better than nothing.

Day minus 7 to minus 2. Try like hell to get lodging in Anton for the weekend. Talk to 20 hotels and pensions in English and 10 in some sort of German. Manage to book rooms in two different pensions – one for me and Mrs horizon, one for my friend who until recently wasn't a maggot. He now registered as Irbis, so I expect to see him posting in this thread.

Day 1. Drive to airport, fly, drive to St Anton. On the way, here's a yummy image of Arlberg Pass. There is snow in the Alps after all.



Irbis isn't so lucky – he flies from Amsterdam to Munich and gets lost on German motorways. He can't have been missing the signs due to driving too fast, as his car is fitted with the world's smallest engine (Lance Armstrong could go faster than that Citroen. Running not cycling). Still, by the time Mrs horizon and I are comfortably settled, he's there. We get our passes by 2.30 (that's 12 full hours after waking up for me). Still, that's two and a half hours of warm-up runs and recco work (none of us have been to St A before).

I've been wondering about how to introduce Irbis to the maggots. However, he posed for a photo with a bunch of Elvis wannabes, so that eliminated the difficulty. Do you think he has a hang-up about his hair?



He also likes his warm-up routine:


Other salient facts on Irbis: former university colleague, plays a good game of basketball (well, he plays often, anyway), has a dry humour which would fit better in England than in his adoptive Netherlands. A smoooooth skier –he just glides. Responsible for one of the worst scares in my skiing life, a long time ago, when he told me that a run I was about to do finished in a cliff drop, and in order to avoid it I was to turn hard right towards the end. (I fell and slid about two hundred feet, wondering about the meaning of life, before I managed to stop. Later it turned out that the cliff drop was only about 30 feet into soft snow, and not even vertical).


Day 2.
We're in business. The sun is up, the snow is mostly crappy but there are pockets of untouched windblown soft goodness (laid on refrozen crap). No time to take photos I'm afraid. Mrs horizon (who's not skiing this weekend – long story) tries to cramp our style by making us stop for lunch. We pretend we're lost on the mountain and get away with it. However, while shaken up by lying to my loved one, I manage to whack Irbis with the chairlift bar over his lip. He takes it like a man, although there's an evil glint in his eye.

At some point, we swap skis. Irbis is a relatively recent convert to wide skis, and hasn't yet gone wider than a Volkl AC4. I'm on Scott Missions (great ski btw, for those days when it's not bottomless). We launch into a yummy bowl. Turns out to be not so yummy- refrozen again. I forgot to mention that his boot sole length is one size bigger than mine, so the bindings fit only loosely. Hence at some point my skis stop dead and I fly out of the bindings. This must be when I got the mother of all bruises on my inner thigh. We swap the skis back. I think this was Irbis paying me back for the lip incident.

Afternoon. We're trying to get to a bar and buy some water. We see these two tracks heading down into an otherwise untracked valley. We look at each other. You can see clearly that the valley ends somewhere close to St Anton. This is the first real powder for the day – there's no way we're not doing this. (Yes, I know that following tracks is jongish behaviour.).

Turns out to be the best decision of the day, by some margin. There's untracked in the bowl we start from, untracked through the trees and untracked amongst some bushes further down. However, when the snow becomes about 1 inch on grass (no joking), we decide to take the skis off. It's a 10-minute walk to the bus stop. On the way we stop and take these pictures, looking back up. You wouldn't think there was any way to slide down, would you? (our line is hidden behind the hill on looker's left).





End of the day: as we're parking the skis overnight, this good-looking lady instructor hears us talking Romanian and chats us up. Turns out she's a former member of the Romanian national ski team, and her career ended with an injury at the Nagano Olympics. She's quite cool. So we take her out to dinner (as you do). Later, in the bar, she points out Karl Schranz's daughter (how's that for name dropping?). We talk about the avalanche involving H-man's brother a couple of weeks before and it turns out she knows both H-man and Christof. Small world.

We ask her whether she'll ski with us the next day. She says she would but she's got a 5-day private lesson with a prince from Liechtenstein. I think we'd have been better fun. I'm absolutely certain she feels the same way (dreaming's free, right?), but she can't get out of the lesson at the last moment.


Day 3. Two fresh inches on the ground (that's a major dump by this season's standards in the Alps). More like 3-4 inches up top. We're off and slaying it in the morning.

This is when I make a potentially bad mistake. Off from the top of the Vallugabahn, we're traversing towards the Valluga draglift, in search of a few turns in pow. I do make sure that there's no one below us (there's a piste, but it turns away to the left, and anyway no one's on it). Turns out that one of the slopes I'm trying to traverse, which was wind-scoured and icy yesterday, is windloaded today. I stop before trying to traverse, with the intention of checking out the stability, but I stop one yard too late. The damn thing goes. I'm able to hold my balance above. It's not a big slide by any means – about 8 yards across and only going about twenty-thirty yards down until the terrain mellows down, but had it caught me, at best I'd have been partially buried. This is quite sobering, so I backtrack and we head off to the pisted stuff. (If anyone wants to ask me questions about the decision-making process, go ahead. I can tell you now that it was pretty poor. The only things that I'm proud of are checking that we had no one underneath us, traversing at a safe distance and stopping frequently to check stability).

So we head off to what we have come to call our valley. It's there and only with our tracks from yesterday, though a snowboarder drops in in front of us. We're not talking gnar terrain – an instructor is just taking some kids there, behind us (not a good idea, if you ask me. These are not even rugged Austrian skier kids – they're English, on a holiday, about 7, 10 and 12 at a guess).

This time we stop to take some pics. Here I am, finding my way through some small bushes:


And here's Irbis, demonstrating bloody good angulation:





Today I am a weak man and accept Mrs horizon's invitation for lunch. Irbis is off to do a run in the meantime. I thought this would be a quick one down the piste, but three quarters of an hour later he's not back. The weather is closing in – fog, snow, strong winds. I manage to get him on the phone after about five attempts. Apparently, he found a Danish chap with his 6-year old son, snowploughing down an itinerary in near-zero visibility, frozen by the wind and scared stiff. Between them they have less than a week on skis. It took Irbis more than half an hour to get them to a blue run. I think he's racked up a lot of karma points for this one.

End of the day – Irbis takes off early to get to Munich on time. I try out the sauna and swimming pool with Mrs horizon (who was quite shocked about swimsuits being strictly verboten in the sauna, and wrapped herself up demurely in her towel). Sorry – no pics of Austrian naked sauna steeze. I'm not sure you'd want to see 50-year olds sweating their fat off, anyway. On the other hand, swimming in the outside pool while fat flakes were falling was cool.

I hope that in a day or two I'll put up the TR from an 8-day trip to Verbier - a lot more action there.

[Hayduke]

This is a sad picture. Nice words though.

Has Irbis got a hot wife/gf? He knows the rules, right?

[stantonbum1]

Sorry to mention this in your TR but in St Anton its never a good idea to follow tracks and not know where you are going (see my post about the avalanche death in st. anton in the slide zone.) The area that you followed the tracks into is Schöngraben, probably one of the more dangerous areas in st. anton, as it is always windloaded.

It is also one of my favorite runs cos normally there is about twice as much snow as anywhere else.

[horizon]

stantonbum1, no problem, but are you sure it was Schongraben? It ended in Bach (next to St Jakob), and except for the entrance bowl it was all between trees and bushes...hard to see how it would be windloaded.

The slope that went, high above, is another matter...but over there we weren't following tracks, we were taking the same shortcut as we did the day before - a question of thirty-forty yards. We really didn't go for anything that was high exposure, as I've got too little avy knowledge and Irbis is even more of a beginner in this area.

[Hicks]

Damn Horizon, the place looks bony. I don't recall having it ever seen worse.
Seems as if you made the best of it.

[irbis]

I would like to start by thanking horizon for posting one of my ugliest photos ever, making jokes about my hair (a lie, please see my avatar photo, I have beautiful hair) and trying to impress everyone with the fact that we are friends...

hayduke - what rules are you talking about?

btw, next time you see horizon say this: restaurant, sleep, restaurant, sleep. see how he reacts.

[irbis]

I found out what the rules are. Since I am single at the moment, here's a naked photo of an ex. I hope hayduke and the rest of the maggots can appreciate how much I want to join this community. If she finds out she is going to kill me.