Hitting Kickers

Zauchensee

Thursday, 02. 9. 2006  –  Category: Snowboarding

Spent 4 days snowboarding in Austria last weekend and had an absolute blast. The first 2 days were spent at Zauchensee and the other 2 at Flachau. I’ll write up Flachau separately.

First, a bit of background on the trip:

We booked flights back in Novemeber 2005, return from Stansted to Salzburg for £40. We also got a cheap car hire deal.

We stayed in the nearby town of Altenmarkt at a nice little apartment paying 25Euro each per night. Bargain. From Altenmarkt it’s about a 15 minute drive to Zauchensee.

Zauchensee ski resort

Zauchensee is about 60km south west of Salzburg in Austria’s Pongau Valley and has loads of other ski areas nearby, including Flachau, Schladming and Obertauern.

Zauchensee itself is a total unknown to most Brits it seemed. I don’t think we heard another British accent there until the end of the second day, not something you can ever say in France. Quite a refreshing change.

The ski area has a couple of gondolas and several chair lifts – all with padded seats and wind shields to keep the wind and snow out - 15 lifts in total. A series of black, red and blue runs with plenty to keep most intermediate skiers and boarders happy.

There are also a number of off-piste tree runs. Unfortunately when we were there it hadn’t snowed for a couple of weeks and off-piste was pretty crusty. By the time we’d moved onto Flachau a couple of days later it was dumping down, so its probably in pretty good shape now.

The sunlight moves around the mountain during the day so most people tend towards the right hand lifts in the morning and move over with the sun to the other side in the arvo as visibility can get pretty poor without it.

We had loads of fun cruising the pistes and hitting the plentiful kickers around the edges.

Useful links:

• Zauchensee weather

Tags: Austria, Ski resorts