Snowboarding, Schladming, Austria 26/01/08 to 02/02/08
Darren & Karl Go Snowboarding
Day 1 - Jan 26th
After getting up at silly-o-clock, and then a hard slog on the coach to Gatwick (urgh) followed by a flight to Salzburg, then a coach to Schladming (of course we had a couple of beers to help us along the way…), we finally arrived at the Club Hotel. Nicola our guide had figured out within 5 minutes that myself and Karl were the equivalent of ADHD kids on Refreshers and Chewits, but 30 years old. Poor Nicola. Ah.
So it was at about 5pm when we rolled into the hotel, me and Karl all keen and eager to get out and start exploring the slopes…’no’ they say….something something….’getting dark soon’…..something, mumble something….’storm coming’…..WHAT! I was like Zebedee on crack, desperately trying to figure out a way to get out of this prison! But we were the lucky ones….
The other 14 or so guests who were supposed to be arriving the same evening as us had in fact been transferred to a hotel from Manchester Airport - knackered part of aircraft to blame - so were stuck in sunny old blighty. While we were stuck in the hotel. Still. Always the morning to look forward to. I head over to hire my snowboard, boots and bindings with the rest of the group and Nicola, before myself and my good companion Mr Luker proceeded to acquaint ourselves with the bar….I consigned myself to the fact that I might only ever actually get to experience 3 full days (plus two half days, a one hour lesson on a dry slope and two hours in the indoor ski in Dubai) on a snowboard, on an actual snowboard up a mountain, in my life. Well, there was always the suicide pill.
Day 2 - Jan 27th
“Wake Up, Wake Up - It’s 730” shouts Karl. He’s up. The lights are on. He’s brushing his teeth and getting ready. I jump out of bed, like a kid at Christmas, running to the bathroom, brushing my teeth, thinking ‘Come On! Snow! Yes!’, only to realise that Karl’s laughing his head off and gone back to bed…18 years I’ve known that man. I should have known. 3am. Back to the sack.
8am - Wake up, throw on base layers, check gear in bag, head to the restaurant, eat food, get to the ski-keller, get dressed and go to head out - power cut. ‘Nicola, why is there a power cut?’ - Nicola is on the phone - ‘Hang on lads’ she says…’You’re not going to believe this’ says Nicola, ‘All the lifts are shut. All of them, for the whole day. There’s a big storm coming in, so they’ve shut everything.’
Well, to say that threw a spanner in my b****ocks would be an understatement. 8 months waiting patiently like a lap-dog. 8 months waiting to make love with the white stuff again, gliding and grinding (or tumbling and rolling in my case). And for this. Well, summoning my reserves of insanity, I instantly declared ‘I don’t care, I’ll walk up the bugger if I have to.’ Which is what I ended up doing….Karl put up with me constantly going on and on about it for an hour and a half until he agreed to go (just to shut me up I think) . I think people thought we were a bit nuts, and I was thinking it could go horribly wrong with a primetime slot on 999 rescue for me and Karl, but I was desperate, man! A couple of hours later, after a walk to the bus station, a bus ride to nowheres-ville and a good hike up the hill, we were there. To be honest, we were aided on the uphill hike by using our boards as sails, the wind was really buffeting us up the hill quite nicely. In fact at one point I thought we would have to walk back down if the wind kept getting up. Or maybe we could be the first snowboarders to go uphill?
pic 1 - Karl with his board after our bus journey into the unknown and a one hour trek up the slopes.
pic 2 - me pointing at my board, I’d dug my board in upside down to take a shot at of Karl, but the wind was that severe it lifted my board, flipped it over and off down the hill. Karl went into Matrix-mode and did a real-time, slo-mo, fast-grab. Would have been another long walk back down for me otherwise!
pic 3 - by the time we decide to head back down the storm was in full flow - horizontal snow, bad visibility, howling winds.
We glide triumphantly down the slope, soaking up the bumps, swooping from side to side, skimming between trees (well, they were more like twigs actually, and I spent a fair amount of time on my arse or crawling along), rejoicing in our decision to venture forth! It only lasted two brief minutes (ah, the same old story…), and most of it was almost impossible to stand up in cos of the wind and the crap snow - icy. And visibility was poor, not much to see. But it got us out of the hotel for a couple of hours, there could have been all sorts of murders if me and Karl were left in a hotel with a bar all day, lonely, in the cold, in a hotel in Austria….or did we end up in a bar somewhere.
Day 3 - Jan 28th
Day 3, day 3, day 3….maybe we did end up in a bar…I feel rough….let me refresh my conker…right, that’s it. This is when the boys on the Manchester flight turned up. Well, maybe they got in the night before, but I sort of remember seeing them Day 3. Now, these guys had a trip out - flight cancelled, put up in a hotel, then up again the next day on to another flight, by this time they were flying in the storm that me and Karl had been out in I guess, rather them than me. By all accounts the sick bags had run out and the pilot had the plane banked right over cos of the cross winds, then just about managed to throw it on the runway just in time to avoid the special effects. Big cheer for the pilot, as we found out that once they got over their flight and travel, these guys were ace - all of them right up for the crack and full of banter. From young whippets Ory (busted on bbc news here) and Gareth, on up to the more respectable members of the group, some of who check in at 61 (no names, but the nutters were doing the downhill speed trial and slalom race with the rest of the gang - I hope my knees are okay for some of that when I’m 60+). Hats off to Keith the downhill bomber and slalom champ - sub-two-minutes on the slalom if you ever read this Keith?!
Anyway, heading out on to the slopes with our trusty guide, Gordon, we set off (to the Planai I think?) we get up to speed pretty quickly, with expert guidance from good old Gordon. I find my feet pretty quickly and manage to not fall over too much, which is a good thing as most of these guys seem to know what they’re doing, and Karl’s handy on a board (any board at all, give him an ironing board, 3 bottles of champagne and some stairs and he’s off….). I still don’t know where the edges of this ‘envelope’ are, or even where the envelope is. This lack of knowledge, coupled with some missing connections between the left and right hemispheres of my ‘brain’ lead me inevitably to the conclusion that, yes, I can indeed snowboard, and of course, extrapolating from this premise, I am quite able to keep up with all the people who’ve been doing it for 16 years.
3pm - it all hurts, I’m sure I got in late, and my mum’s not here to make it all feel better. I head back to the hotel for an hours nap.
5pm - I need to go out, I need to go out, I need to go out…night ski night ski night ski…Karl’s back, Ryan the night porter has offered to let us tag along to the Hockwurzen mountain, where they piste the runs and then throw on the floodlights for a few hours. Banging. Must have been one of my favourite parts of the trip. Totally clean red runs I think, with some pretty steep bits, no need to put the anchors on anywhere at all as it was as smooth as, and starlight toboggan runs in near darkness. Very few people too. Big smiles were the order of the night and I’d definitely recommend it to anyone. Plenty of adrenaline with the speed, and great for fun down the toboggan run too.
Dinner at midnight kindly set aside by the boys and girls at the hotel (cheers Marcus) was appreciated, then scrub and bed….zzzzz….sweet dreams….
Day 4 - Jan 29th
Now I’m really struggling to remember what day 4 was….let me check the photos, see if that spurs on my memory a bit…actually, maybe Gordon took us all back over to the Hockwurzen for the day, or was it the Reiteralm. I definitely remember doing the Hockwurzen after the night run. That might have been the day that Karl snapped his bindings, got a hired board and then me and Karl decided to board all the way back to the hotel, the others opting for a cushy little apres-ski for an hour or two to warm up the bones.
I think this was the day I scored Top Crash, with Karl wiping out right in front of me, me hitting him, somersaulting right over the top, head first. Keith thought I’d broken my neck, but pah, twas a mere flesh wound. Nothing the chiropractor can’t fix. Karl escaped with all his fingers, so we were both in one piece. Or is that two pieces?
Karl bombing downhill - click to open video
Day 5 - Jan 30th
D Day
‘D’ in this case is the abbreviation for a couple of things. One, is ‘Darren’, the other, is ‘Death’. The third is ‘Dangerous’. The fourth is ‘Daft’. Maybe ‘D’ is the abbreviation for a few things. ‘Don’t Do It’ and ‘Disaster Movie’ are a couple of combos that spring to mind too.
Off Piste
We sprang up on Day 5 to another day of fine weather, white pistes and the promise of adventure. Gordon was in fine form, taking us all over the place at a nice pace which kept us busy. We’d got to know Karate Kid Keith (known for his high speed wipeouts at 60kmh and above), The Eggman, about 8 or 9 Dave’s at least, Orry, Gareth and the others quite well now. They were a very forgiving party of ski-ers, considering the well documented animosity which supposedly exists between people on skis and people on boards. We were really having a great crack with them.
So, it’s Day 5, I’m finding my groove, done a little off-piste with “I’m addicted to Off-Piste like crack cocaine” Luker, and generally feeling okay about the whole thing. Apart from Karl constantly talking about some suicide mission or other off a 200 foot high sheer drop to doom! Our chance came when we finally lost most of the group, and decided to follow them to the black run we thought they’d gone up to.
Black Run
As we later found out, we were initially on the right path, but it was flat, and flat is no good for boarders, so we thought we’d take a shortcut through the trees and a (much) steeper section down to what we believed was the path continuing below us. When we arrived at the path, we discovered that it wasn’t the path at all. It was a path. Not the path. Unfortunately for us, we’d already descended a good hundred metres or so, and thought we could follow below a chair lift and columns we’d spotted all the way to the bottom and ride back up in comfort. That all worked out wonderfully, until we happened upon a sign some way down which said something like “Immediate Death to Any Who Trespass Here. Highly Dangerous. Do Not Enter. We Mean It.”
That buggered our plan up a little bit, but being a highly resourceful chap, Karl came up with a cracker of a plan -
Karl - “Well, how about we just go left a bit here, through this forest of trees.”
Darren - “Well, how about you f*** off, I am not going in there.”
Karl - “Come on mate, it’ll be alright, we’ll just track alongside the ski-lift and follow it to the bottom.”
Darren - “I don’t care what you say mate, this is a bad idea. I want you to remember me definitely saying I’m not up for it.”
Karl - “Southern poof, come on, it’s fine”
Darren - “If we end up dead, you’ve had it.”
The Forgotten Woods
So, that was how we ended up in the Forgotten Woods. It was steep, it was dark, stumps lurked under the snow and as I found out after falling over, the powder was up to my armpits. (Well, let’s say top of my thigh. Bit of artistic license there. You know, exagerate wildly to make your point and so on.). The trees were not designed here for ‘pleasure boarding’. They were tight together and prone to lacerating your eyes and face at all times. This is where I had my first experience of snowboarding through trees. Not between them, through them. I went through trees and branches forwards, backwards, upside down, back to front and even uphill at one point I think. I came out spitting pine needles, looking like a raggedy version of Arctic Combat Action Man, twigs and camouflage sticking out of my helmet and mossy stains all over my jacket and trousers.
Footprints
After an hour or so, I thought it might even be getting a little darker than it already was. Luckily we had stumbled across what looked like the tracks from some other maniacs who had probably stumbled in here as we did, and were now probably roasting merrily in some gingerbread house nearby. A boarder following ski tracks it looked like. We lost the ski tracks after an hour or so. By this time we had followed the tracks, crossed a stream which the guy on the board had obviously landed a 10 foot or so jump over and just carried on. We followed. This worried me a little, as it meant that he knew what he was doing. Whereas me and Karl quite obviously didn’t. Another stretch of downhill through trees resulted in me having to drop off a little 3/4 foot ledge, which I mis-judged and landed badly. Unfortunately there was a tree stump right where my right arse cheek landed, which caused a slight whimper to escape my lips I must admit. Luckily no shattered pelvis, so on we went. Catching the top of a mountain through trees, I could see the white ball of the sun through the clouds, close to the top of the mountain, which I calculated using my pocked abacus indicated that something called ‘night-time’ wasn’t far away. Several descents and climbs through 2/3 foot snow later, se dragging board along, dripping with sweat from the exertion of uphill snow walking and thirsty as hell, we hit daylight, coming round the shoulder of a hill to see the ski lift again and a pisted run over the valley. This was an exhilarating moment. Handshakes for me and Karl, we knew then that we were definitely all right.
Pic on Left - the two white patches centre and top of the mountain are roughly where we started we think. Then, looking at the picture, we seem to have gone through all the trees and valleys to the right.
Pic on Right - me expressing my thanks to Karl for our off piste excursion…
Day 6 - Jan 31st
The last full day of snowboarding was a good one. We’d had a bit of a night out the night before with all the guys, gone to the ‘log cabin’ type club they have there to try and pretend we can still do it as we could at 20 years old, and still managed to find the energy to get up for the final day’s outing. I seem to remember this involving a coach trip somewhere, some good fun on the pistes, some not-so-good lunch decisions by me (looked like pea soup, not good after the night before…) and generally starting to feel achy.
At the start of the trip I’d wanted to go full-bore. I wanted snowboarding all day, snowboarding all night, go home. But by Friday I was knackered and sore, so Saturday we elected to go with Nicola our guide, and the rest of the party to Salzburg for a couple of hours before the flight.
Day 7 - Feb 1st
Salzburg turned out to be a nice surprise. They really do have some style in Salzburg I must say, very impressed. Lovely architecture, great cake makers and a lovely fish restaurant that Nicola took me and Karl to (yes, we were pestering about food again…)
The only disappointing thing about Saturday was we didn’t really get a chance to say goodbye to the friends we’d made on holiday - the guys who we were out with every day, and the rest of the gang who were either at ski-school or doing their own thing. We really got on well with them so it’s a big hello to Keith, Orry, Ron, Ian, Alan, John, Dave, Dave, David, Graham, Jeff, Gareth and Stuart (I’m sure there were a couple more Daves…) and a big thank you for putting up with us!
Videos Of The Gang Snowboarding
I put these all here at the bottom - some of them are pretty big and take a while to buffer, so you might have to be patient. You can right click the link and choose ‘Save As’ if you want to download it to your machine and watch it later -