Tuesday, April 17, 2012

St Anton

So I didn't last very long before the need to be on the slopes hit once again.

Last week I had a great little week in St Anton, Austria, to finish off the season. Being as its right at the end, the conditions were quite warm and the snow patchy. In fact the resort advertises it as the crystal snow season, the snow looking a lot like big wet bath salt crystals. The skiing conditions were actually still OK with pretty good coverage and a fair amount of stuff to do. The benefits with coming so late in the season is that the weather is warm, for t-shirt skiing and the resort is practically empty, so no packed runs.

Friends on this trip were a couple of mates from previous new years trips Jayne and Rich. Also because we were joining a large chalet we hung out with the other guests, a good mix of ages and drinking abilities!

One of the big apes-ski places is called the Mooserwirt, a big outdoor bar and dance/music place. I'm not sure of the quality of the Austria style techo dance but once the beer is going it seemed very danceable. In fact we've got some great pictures of us dancing on the balcony.

For this trip I tried a new packing approach to skiing and cut everything down to the bare minimum. This worked quite well, with me easily making the airline weights, but became a bit of a problem one evening. We had been enjoying a dance and a jager or two at the Mooserwirt before head back down to the resort and found that the equipment storage lockers had been closed for the night. It would have been OK as we could taken the stuff back to the chalet unfortunately I only brought the one pair of shoes in my packing which were in the locker so had to spend the night in, sans footwear.

One quirk of the booking and flights meant that we had an extra day in the resort so I took the opportunity to have a day snowboarding. Once I got my head around it again, its been 7-8 year since I did a week, it was good fun with some reds and black and some annoying flats.

Another quirk was my leaving bus which was a couple of hours after everyone else. I went for a wander and sat in the sun, while I waited. The whole resort seemed almost deserted, I really did seem to the last person out.

A good trip.