The ski area here in Hinterglemm claims to have 200km of piste. Not all of them have snow on them at the moment, but the challenge we set ourselves was to do the “ski circus”, a visit to every peak and every town in the area.
One of the other nice features of the ski area is that they keep track of everywhere your ski pass has been and calculate the total distance for each day of the trip. For our grand tour day, Rachel’s skipass recorded 7942m of descent and 45km of skiing in 7:24!
It was a brilliant day – there was new snow in the morning, and in the afternoon the snow came back with a vengeance, dumping at least 5cm of fluffy fresh flakes on the piste. A few of the runs were a bit tricky with cloud reducing visibility to about 5m, but a well timed hot chocolate and apple strudel stop (sorry, no pictures, the camera fogged up) allowed us to escape the worst.
It turns out that the full tour was just a bit too much for us to do in a day (we shouldn’t have stopped for the strudel). We visited all the towns, and all but one of the peaks, but didn’t quite have the energy to ride the last lift up and connect back to our starting place. Oh well, we’ll have to come back for another attempt!
Today is our last day so we’ve been taking it a bit easier. Rachel only managed 26km, although the large germknodel she consumed in the mid-afternoon could have had something to do with that! We’ve had sun all day, and got to start on the fresh snow from yesterday, although by the afternoon the warm temperature had turned that to spring slush.
All in all, we’ve had a great week in Hinterglemm. The skiing has been surprisingly good for this late in the season. We’ve made some new friends (we’ll be working on one to post his adventures on the blog), and thoroughly taste-tested the Austrian cake possibilities! An excellent holiday.
Sounds fab; can’t wait for the next ski season!
Cool ski pass.
I went to Saalbach on my second ever ski trip… They certainly didn’t have that flashy technology then.