Austria Debrief
Having just recently returned from our three month ski trip to Tyrol, Austria, I thought I'd do a quick wrap-up of our time over there.
Quick Recap
In the winter of 2024 my wife Claudia and I spent three months in Tyrol, Austria, mostly based in the Zillertal, a long valley southeast of Innsbruck featuring numerous villages and four large ski areas (plus several smaller ones too). During our time in the Zillertal we stayed in different apartments in Mayrhofen, Aschau, Fügen, and Finkenberg. In early February we spent two weeks in East Tyrol, then after more time back in the Zillertal, in late March we spent our final week in Serfaus, a ski town further west from Innsbruck.
The Snowboarding
The northern Alps had a remarkable early season, with storm after storm in November and December. Unfortunately the snowfall slowed down quite a bit once we arrived in January, but at least there was a good snowpack already. While it wasn't really an epic snowy winter while we were there, we did get a fair amount of powder days as well as a bunch of smaller sneaky powder days that were way better than they ought to have been.
I ended up riding 49 days in total there, and all in all this was the best winter for snowboarding I've had in many years! I had about 5 or 6 powder days in particular that ranked amongst my most memorable resort powder days ever, which is quite something for just one winter season!
The star of the show for me was Hintertux - my happy place in the Zillertal. It's the highest ski area at the far end of the Zillertal, it tends to get the most and best snow, it's usually the least crowded, and the views from the top are phenomenal. But the best thing about it was all the sneaky powder days I had up there when the wind buffed out the snow and I got to ride untracked lines all morning long with hardly anyone else around!
Hochzillertal/Hochfügen was another highlight. This is probably the best ski area I've ever been to. The mountains there seems to have been designed by the ski gods, as everything has a nice long fall line aspect, there's a vast amount of easily accessed and high quality off-piste terrain, and the lift and piste network is well thought out allowing you to efficiently get around such a large area.
The Photography
The Zillertal Alps (where we were most of the time) are big and impressive mountains. When you're up on any of the ski areas, the views looking across to the high peaks are awesome. I usually brought a telephoto lens with me and I often had fun zooming in on distant rugged peaks from various vantage points. And there are so many different prominent peaks around that I rarely shot the same peak twice even after 2 months!
For this trip I used a Nikon Z30 with 16-50mm (24-75mm equiv.) and 50-250mm (75-375mm equiv.) lenses. I chose this system mainly because of the compact, lightweight, and sharp lenses (which also feature effective optical stabilization for handheld shooting). I don't know of any other system that offers a 24-375mm equivalent zoom range in such a small total package. I was very pleased with this camera setup for this trip and was especially glad that I brought the telephoto lens which I used a lot.
I shot a total of 9,810 photos on this trip. Of these, there were only about 180 keepers, or photos that I thought were worthy of processing and publishing on my site. That's a keeper rate of 1.8%, or 1 out of every 55 photos. Of those 180 keepers, roughly two thirds were shot with the 16-50mm lens, and one third with the 50-250mm lens (though I'd say that most of my favorite photos were from the telephoto).
Due to logistical limitations, I wasn't able to get up high to photograph the many colorful sunrises or sunsets that I saw on the webcams. So I was mainly limited to daytime shooting, keeping an eye out for interesting shadows and clouds amongst the peaks. Therefore during this trip I often shot with black and white photos in mind - much more so than I normally would.
Until Next Time!
All in all, it was such a fun and memorable three months with Claudia in Tyrol and I rode and photographed and generally experienced far more than I normally would in an entire winter at home in Colorado. I would love to do another long ski trip in the Alps again, and I can imagine this being an annual or semi-annual tradition (budget permitting, of course!). I love it where I live in Colorado, but winters in the Alps are something special indeed!