jamesdeluxe
Well-known member
- Joined
- Jul 17, 2020
For Day 2, I headed over to the Big Show: Ischgl. Not sure how many acres it covers (they only measure it in trail length: 256 kms/160 miles), but it's huge.
This morning, they were calling for several inches of fresh snow, and by the time I got to the upper mountain, it was coming down pretty hard. Conditions were really nice, but with everything above the treeline, visibility was pretty poor: seriously flat light. At one point, I had to sit down for about 40 minutes to get my head to stop spinning from the vertigo:
Finally, around 12:30, the snow stopped with about seven inches and the sun came out. The groomed trails were sweetened up nicely and the off-piste was fantastic: calf- to knee-deep:
Around 3:30, on what was going to be my final run of the day, I found a beautiful knee-deep line that I followed for about 500 vertical feet, then got greedy and skied past an obvious exit point, and missed one of these:
I ran into a boarder who informed me that we had both followed sucker tracks right into a cliff. Alps resorts don't make a habit of warning you about every possible danger like in the States, so when they do, it's usually for a good reason. We both bootpacked all the way back to the bailout.
I finished up the day with a beautiful 1,500-vert run through the trees and continued down to the village:
Back in Ischgl, I got a look at its renowned post-skiing festivities including Der Kuhstall (The Cow's Barn):
Miss Russia:
And rewarded myself with this hard-earned Franziskaner:
This morning, they were calling for several inches of fresh snow, and by the time I got to the upper mountain, it was coming down pretty hard. Conditions were really nice, but with everything above the treeline, visibility was pretty poor: seriously flat light. At one point, I had to sit down for about 40 minutes to get my head to stop spinning from the vertigo:
Finally, around 12:30, the snow stopped with about seven inches and the sun came out. The groomed trails were sweetened up nicely and the off-piste was fantastic: calf- to knee-deep:
Around 3:30, on what was going to be my final run of the day, I found a beautiful knee-deep line that I followed for about 500 vertical feet, then got greedy and skied past an obvious exit point, and missed one of these:
I ran into a boarder who informed me that we had both followed sucker tracks right into a cliff. Alps resorts don't make a habit of warning you about every possible danger like in the States, so when they do, it's usually for a good reason. We both bootpacked all the way back to the bailout.
I finished up the day with a beautiful 1,500-vert run through the trees and continued down to the village:
Back in Ischgl, I got a look at its renowned post-skiing festivities including Der Kuhstall (The Cow's Barn):
Miss Russia:
And rewarded myself with this hard-earned Franziskaner:
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