This holiday and our previous one in St Anton were both to celebrate 40th Birthdays - not ours I'll hasten to add 8)
The celebration was really the only common thread between the two holidays. St Anton is a full on party town with skiing to match where as in Obergurgl things are throttled back some what.
Saturday morning saw us sat on the apron at Gatwick for an hour waiting for Innsbruck to reopen. We were litteraly taxiing to the runway when they shut the airport. It wasn't really a problem. They served us breakfast and then we were off.
We were staying in the hotel Alpenaussicht which is in the lower end of the town and fairly close to a one of the two main gondolla's. The town itself is pretty much entirely made up of fairly new looking hotels situated at either end of the main road. Obergurgl is at the end of the valley so traffic was fairly minimal.
The skiing area was quite small compared to St Anton and we managed to ski most of the Obergurgl routes on the first day. Having said that, most of the pistes are massively wide and some very undulating which allows you an almost infinite number of routes down a single piste. We spent virtually a whole day just on Red 17 finding new routes each time down.
I had imagined Obergurgl as being quite desolate due to the altitude but infact it also has some very nice slopes below the tree line. There's also some opportunity to find your own routes between the pistes and amongst the trees.
On day three we headed over to Hochgurgl on the gondolla and was met by an absoulutely massive sprawl of blue pistes. As I have a bit of a carving fettish I managed to really fall for the place. On the piste map it's a series of pistes but on the ground it's just one massive undulating playground. It has steep sections, flat sections, rollers, deep, everything. It's mostly supported with chair lifts but these move at a fair old lick so get you back up for your next run pretty quickly.
At the very top of the area is the Star bar which is just an amazing thing. Perched right on top of the mountain at just over 3000m it has views down the valley and then behind across Italy to the Dolomites. From there's it's a choice of a fairly easy black or a narrow blue to get back down to the main area. Skidaddle you'd love it.
The abfahrt down into Hochgurgl was also a surprise. All between the trees but unlike most of the other abfahrt's I've skied, this one is really wide. The snow was also holding up well with it only getting scrapey right at the bottom.
The other two skiers in our party were both more or less first timers and so were booked into ski school for most of the week. For the first two days one had only two people in their class. This swelled to about 4 later in the week. This was mirrored pretty much everywhere else with some very quiet pistes. Their 4 year old daughter also had 1-1 ski school in the mornings and 1-1 attention in the creche in the afternoons. Infact she could probably have done with a few more kids to play with.
All in all, we had a really good time. I could easily place it up there as one of my favorites. For a carver Hochgurgl was superb and the red 17 in Obergurgl was just a dream after a heavy snowfall.
If I go again I'll probably try and make sure I'm staying at the top end of town but there's not a lot in it to be honest.
The Hochgurgl Abfahrt
The Star Bar above the clouds
The view across Italy
The poshest urinal I've ever seen!
Sorry, didn't take too many photos. Have lots of very funny video mind. It's great skiing with learners!
