J2Ski Forum Posts and Replies by Wanderer

Travelled out on Friday, 13th March on flight to Zurich with a couple of lads for a short break. Car hire sorted and down to resort only arriving shortly before midnight. A couple of quick pints and then bed.

Up early on Saturday morning to beautiful blue skies :). A quick trip over to Pettneu to pick up skis hired from Mietski (big saving on downtown St Anton prices make it worth the hassle if you have a car) and then back to St Anton, ski passes sorted and up the mountain.

Headed over towards Stuben area initially. Lovely runs over there and nice and quiet. Snow was hard packed but a joy to ski – great for some high speed cruising :D. The runs down the back off Albona are nice, though a little short and serviced by a slow 2-man chair. Runs back down to Stuben or Alpe Rauz are long and fast.

After a pleasant lunch in Stuben itself, we headed back into the main St Anton area and headed up the 3-man Schildlergrat lift. Red 13 off the top is a steep red – a little bit busy but well worth doing. Took a short cut at the corner along one of the routes to cut out the long schuss. Most of the route was more like a piste with only one tricky pitch of large moguls.

I had to finish early to get down to see Ireland beat Wales to keep their Grand Slam hopes alive. Unfortunately, Wales had other ideas :oops:. An extraordinary defensive display from Wales combined with too many errors from Ireland and the Grand Slam was gone. Fair play to Wales for a magnificient performance (b*****ds) :mrgreen:. Some drowning of sorrows required so quite a few weissbiers consumed over the rest of the evening :mrgreen:.

Sunday morning came around a little earlier than was welcome but this was a ski trip not a holiday so up and at 'em :wink:. Another blue sky.

We decided to drive over to Lech. Headed over to Warth pretty much straightaway and had a wonderful day on virtually deserted pistes. It's a great area and with a nice variety of slopes.

Was operating without regard to the piste map in the main but this backfired. Followed signs for a particular piste and followed it down until I reached a dead end in a small clearing with 3 or 4 houses and no sign of life and no lift out of the place – meanwhile the other lads had gone a different direction so were off somewhere else :oops:. I feared it might take me hours to get sorted but after a little more exploring I found the main road and a bus stop. Thankfully, a bus came along only a few minutes later to take me back to the main area :shock:. It turned out the piste was essentially the home run for the neighbouring village of Strocken which is not yet lift-connected :roll:.

After lunch we headed back to the main Lech area and skied a number of runs in that area. Home runs got a bit slushy in the afternoon but otherwise great conditions.

Hit a few of the après ski bars in St Anton when we got back and finished up having dinner and a few pints in the Underground on the Piste. Nice food, good music and a good evening was had 8).

Monday morning, we headed over to Zurs with the intention of doing the White Ring Circuit. However, we got our ski legs in first with several runs down pistes, 15, 16 and 17 in Zurs. These are really nice pistes, we had them to ourselves and it was possible to bomb down them. Time for some whooping of the kind only skiing can extract from middle-aged men :shock:.

We then headed over to the Madloch and took the route down to Zug. Even though it is on the piste map as a route, it had been pisted reasonably recently and was no more difficult than a hard Red. A long interesting descent. Then a chair (Zugerberg?) up to the main Leach area, some skiing around there before descending into the village, crossing the road and taking the Cablecar up the other side to follow the White Ring back to Zurs. Some nice skiing on Reds 1,2 and 3 in Zurs before finishing up :lol:.

Tuesday was our last day – a late flight out of Zurich beckoned. Normally, I would stay local in such circumstances but we had enjoyed the skiing in Zurs so much we headed back there. Light was flat in the early morning so no bombing this time :(.

It did clear up a bit later on and we pretty much completed a similar circuit to the previous day before finishing up around 3pm. A quick shower and change and off to the airport.

A fantastic trip yet again but curiously, we skied very little in St Anton itself (once we had the car to get across to Lech or Zurs so easily). With the addition of Warth, the Zurs/Lech /Warth area is now immense and provides a lovely range of piste skiing – far better than St Anton :wink:. It was also much quieter so that we often had entire slopes to ourselves.

St Anton was obviously livelier in the evenings though it was appreciably quieter on Monday evening that the previous 2 evenings:lol:.

I don't have any photos but did bring my new toy - a GoPro :shock: Once I figure out how to make a half decent video, I will upload one or two to bore you all :roll:.

Just back from St Anton. Their ski hire prices are ridiculous and there is a remarkable consistency of prices across all the different shops :evil:. My understanding is that nearly all of them are owned by just 2 families. The Austrian competition authorities could probably have fun if they took a close look :roll:.

We used Mietski this time around. They operate a little bit like Ryanair :shock: If you book early enough, the price is really low but then it rises as you get closer to your dates or if demand is particularly high at that time. You also get exactly the skis that you book.

The only difficulty is that they tend to operate out of town and they service St Anton from a premises in Pettneu, which is about 6km from St Anton. We had a car so this was not a problem and saved us about €50 each :wink:.

Bizarre but lucky to suffer relatively minor injuries :shock:

Yet another thing to fear on a ski trip :roll:.

I am surprised nobody has started a thread on this one.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11443072/Skiers-trapped-in-the-Alps-after-huge-boulder-blocks-mountain-road.html. Caused chaos the weekend before last with a 50 mile tailback on the motorway heading towards the area. Apparently those who were due to leave were being brought out on minibuses down a single lane track that was decidedly hairy :shock:. The road was severely damaged so I don't know if it is fully open again. Presumably the big rock has been cleared away :lol:. Thankfully, the rock did not hit a car or bus when it fell.

The other "disaster" in the past week is the tree falling on the line supporting the Ciampinoi gondola in Val Gardena. Thankfully, the wires held and rescue teams were able to get some 200 skiers off the lift safely.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/snowandski/skiing-news/11461418/New-video-cable-car-ski-rescue-in-Italy.html. I had assumed that the lift would be closed for quite some time while engineers checked it out for damage, etc, but apparently, it reopened very soon afterwards. I suspect traffic on it is somewhat lighter than usual :roll:. It is a key lift on the Sella Ronda circuit so I guess they didn't hang around in terms of repairs/inspections :wink:.

..... and to think we do this for fun :mrgreen:.

My oldest possession (in ski terms) is my jacket. Its quite colourful - mainly a bright yellow but with nice blue and black trim. Very distinctive on the slopes :roll:.

I bought it in Italy nearly 20 years ago and it is still going strong. though beginning to show its age a little in recent years (a bit like myself :oops:). It was the Italian ski team official supporters club jacket that year. I got it at end of season for half price. It was still reasonably expensive but very good quality as evidenced by its longevity :mrgreen:. Spotted several other examples on the slopes of the Dolomites on my recent trip. So it is not just me that is making it last :lol:.

I am reluctantly coming to the conclusion that I should think about a new jacket but the thought is a bit traumatic :shock:. Also want something distinctive and modern jackets seem to be really boring in the main :evil:.

Was on that gondola only a couple of weeks ago :shock:

Glad I wasn't on it when this happened, though I suppose it would be quite a talking point. Not sure I'd ever the OH back on a lift if it happened to her :oops:.

Great that nobody was hurt :D.

I wonder have some of the resorts simply improved their infrastructure enough to be better able to cope with larger crowds :?:. There is no doubt that the modern high speed 4 and 6-man chairlifts plough through a crowd very quickly.

Where you tend to get bottlenecks is usually at cable cars or older, slower lifts. Resorts like La Plagne are so vast that it is usually possible to get away from the crowds easily and quickly by moving out to the fringes of the resort and avoiding the obvious areas:wink:.

We were there last year for a long weekend about a week earlier than you are going. It was still busy and great fun. Its a wonderful ski area and condition should be absolutely fine, though you might have to plan out your day to get the best of the conditions :wink:.

The après is mental if you want it. We tended to head to the Kitzloch (I think) which had the traditional Austrian Euro-pop/local ballad type music which does tend to lead to lots of dancing in ski boots, sometimes on tables, etc. Its a fun place if you like that can of thing :mrgreen:.

At the table next to us, a Scandanavian group had bought a 5 litre bottle of Grey Goose vodka - yes, 5 litres :shock:. I think it cost them about €900, though the Red Bull may have been thrown in for that price :roll:. I think they worked through it over 2 or 3 nights but were completely hammered by the time the après finished at 7.30pm :oops:. The big hotel at the bottom of the home run, whose name I have forgotten, was also very popular. A particular "attraction" for some was the girls in skimpy traditional outfits gyrating on the counters :x.