About seven weeks ago I arrived here in the Arlberg, I came to ride powder, deep powder. I found beer, jäger, schnaps and developed a small belly from all the bad food I ate. Sometimes I got my hopes up after a dump of 5 or maybe 10cm snow, but in general I found sharks or got stuck at the bottom of a run. It wasn’t that bad, due to a pretty safe avalanche situation I could do steep couloirs and long tours, I had fun for sure.
There it was, the first proper powder alert for our region. In total they were expecting about 70cm, I felt blessed, just hoped the new snow wouldn’t lead to a seriously increased avalanche danger.
There were we, sitting in the first gondola going up. How deep would it be, how would the snow be, will the sharks be covered? No idea, but when I made the first turn it was gone, no thoughts just clean honest pleasure. Before this weeks passed with us saying: ‘when this pillow line gets into shape, I’ll straight-line it!’. Time had come to put our words into deeds and that is what we did. The first day we spent in Sonnenkopfs’ forest, playing around with pillows, drops and weird trees.
Lovely, a day tree-riding especially after waiting for so long. Last year @steef told me that while he was powderchasing we would never really see the sun. We got lucky, straight after the first part of the dump there was a bluebird day! So we had the oppurtinity to enjoy the good sight and work on our goggle-tans. We started out in Stuben, doing some small runs just underneath the lift and with a small break in the bus to Zürs we arrived to shred on till sunset.
It wasn’t over yet, it had started to snow again and we woke up to another 20cm of fresh powder and it was still snowing. Back to the Sonnenkopfs’ forrest to start doing the same lines we did 2 days ago. This time we got really lucky, slowly they were opening the whole resort lift by lift and while the sun came out we were riding deep powder pretty damn efficiently.
Oh wait, guess what? Next day, blue bird =).
After all these days awesome days, stoke took over. We thought we could do anything, so we decided to ride close to each other dropping this lip in a complete open powderfield. Completely nuts if I think back.
I got lucky, just a small injury to my knee, could have been a season ender or worse…