The Head First Only Guide to Skiing in Austria
Austria was the first place I ever skied on real snow, and the first place I saw really impressive mountains. It was strange going back to those first slopes years later - pistes that had taken me half an hour to get down when I was a beginner took me a couple of minutes.
Austria is a popular destination for English package ski holidays. The resort of Söll used to be very popular with the Club 18-30 crowd a few years back, and featured heavily in the BBC TV documentary "On the piste" as an example of all that was bad about skiing. Despite this, it is possible to have a civilised holiday in Soll, and English is spoken by many of the locals.
By road :
The only members of the HFO to do this travelled from the U.K. to St. Anton. The verdict: "never again!"
By Air :
The HFO have flown to Austrian holidays via both Munich airport in Germany, and Salzburg airport in Austria. On a clear day, as you walk down the steps off the plane, you can see the mountains off on the horizon. As of our last visit, Munich doesn't have satellite terminals or walkways between the aircraft and the terminal, so you may end up getting on the bus to customs in a snowstorm.
From both Munich and Salzburg the coach transfer took a couple of hours. From Munich the coach passes the Völkl ski factory at Kufstein. Crossing the border was uneventful.
Centre of HFO operations for several years was the resort of Ellmau at the foot of the Wilder Kaiser in the Grossraum ski area. Be careful where you stay here - some of the accommodation can be a good twenty minutes walk from the town centre - not popular when you're meeting up for a meal in the evening.
Ellmau is within easy striking distance of the other resorts in the Grossraum circuit: Going, Scheffau, Söll and Westendorf. All the resorts are at fairly low altitude, and can suffer in years when the snow's bad. One year we got back to Soll to find that rain had turned the snow around the village into green fields.
The best skiing in the area was at Westendorf, where there were a number of quite demanding red runs.
Grading - Black runs in Austria are fairly few and far between, but if you find one, it'll be quite a challenge. Most of the runs around the Grossraum tended to be reds.
At our last visit, Austria was still using a lot of T-bar lifts. It's advisable to travel up these with someone you know, as getting off them can be quite tricky for the inexperienced. Coordination is a good idea or you can find yourself being lifted off the ground with the lift bar behind your knees.
Austria isn't the sort of place that sees a lot of vegetarians, and the local restaurants cater for people who like their meat red, served in large quantities. Staple lunchtime diet was Goulash soup, with rye bread, or sausages of one type or another. Evening meals in restaurants offered a wide variety of steaks, veal, or occasionally chicken.
For lighter menus, the Austrians excel at soups. Apart from the goulash mentioned earlier, Frittaten Suppe consists of a soup with slices of fried pancake - very filling. Highly recommended, but only if everyone else has it too, is garlic soup. Be warned that it becomes very obvious what you had for dinner if you order it.
Austria really comes into its own when it comes to desserts. The HFO dish of choice, and star of many heroic tales, is the mighty Germknödel, a suet and mincemeat concoction which can lower your centre of gravity by several inches. Glorious.