Chasing Powder in the Alps (Part 1): Low Tide in Austria
After visiting Claudia's family over Christmas in Germany, we took the train down to Munich and picked up a rental car for the next phase of our winter Euro trip: a month of skiing and snowboarding in the Alps! This is the third year in a row that we've spent January in the Alps (2024 in Austria and 2025 in France), and these trips have proven to be the highlights of these last years for me!
As January rolled around, though, my excitement was tamped down a bit by the fact that the Alps were experiencing a miserably low snow year so far. Powder prospects looked grim, with much of the Alps barely having any snowpack at all below about 2000 meter elevation. Winter trips are always a gamble with the snow, and I was starting to wonder if this trip was a mistake! But in any case, we were there, we had the car, and we might as well make the best of it.
The full moon about to set behind Ellmauer Halt (2,342 m), the highest peak of the Kaisergebirge range.
While planning this trip, I had hoped to spend most of our time in Austria (depending on the snow, of course), since there are a lot more ski areas there I want to check out there, plus we have ski passes that give us a bunch of free ski days there.
After a fun evening in Munich visiting our friends Jürgen and Hilia, we decided to head to the Saalbach-Hinterglemm "Ski Circus" in the Salzburg state of Austria (east of Tyrol). The Ski Circus connects four ski resorts into one enormous ski area featuring 70 lifts and 270 km of groomed pistes! Check out the trail map to get a sense of the scale.
From a base in the village of Feiberbrunn, we spent our first ski day of our season doing a huge loop through the entire Ski Circus, from Feiberbrunn to Hinterglemm to Saalbach to Leogang, where we finally caught a ski bus back to Feiberbrunn at the end of the day. While there wasn't enough snow for any off-piste powder hounding, they did have almost all the pistes open and it was fun to cruise around and cover so much ground on this beautiful sunny (but frigid) day.
We also enjoyed the views of the rugged northern limestone Alps, including the Kaisergebirge which we trekked across in the summer of 2017. These jagged, rocky mountains around here are reminiscent of the Dolomites, but on the north side of the Alps.
Clouds stream off the rugged summit of Birnhorn (2,633 m) in the Leoganger Steinberge.
If you follow my blog you might recall that I badly injured my toe back in the autumn. Over the last three months it's been a constant concern in the back of my head whether or not my toe would be healed enough for this big January snowboard trip. So I was greatly relieved that on this first big day of riding it did just fine with no problems at all! Phew.
Looking north from the top of the Kitzsteinhorn ski area in Austria. To the right of center is Zell am See, and the sharp pyramidal peak on the left center horizon is Watzmann in Germany!
Not too far from the Ski Circus we visited another ski area on my hit list – Kitzsteinhorn. This is one of Austria's high glacier resorts, with the top part situated on a [receding] glacier and rest flowing down the rocky glacial remnants. It reminded me very much of Hintertux, another Austrian glacial ski area that was one of my favorite places to ride during the 2024 winter.
The valley below Kitzsteinhorn is the same place where we started our 8-day hut trek through the Hohe Tauern back in September 2022; here's a photo of the backside of Kitzsteinhorn from further up the valley. Between this, the Kaisergebirge and Watzmann, we're quite familiar with the mountains around here by now, just not in winter!
During our stay in Fieberbrunn, our powder prospects suddenly looked brighter when the weather forecast started calling for a massive storm to hit western Switzerland! Time to hit the road... the chase was on!!!
