I always feel a little anxious when we leave for a destination without a room reservation but because we did everything so last minute, like we usually do, I just collected a list of BnB phone numbers and started calling them from the car. The first woman who said they had a room available was actually the owner of the cheapest place, so that was quite convenient. It was a little farm in the village right across the Hauser Kaibling skilift, a cute little house with two rooms to let, so it really was small and peaceful, too. We were the only guests and we received a great breakfast every morning, not so early, because Jani is not too good at getting up early for skiing, although I also enjoyed sleeping in for a change.
Usually, we bought a pass from 11 o'clock and we were on the slopes until the end of the day. Schladming-Dachstein (or 'snidling', as we called it) is similar to Bad Kleinkichheim (or 'béka', as we called it) in that the skilifts and the slopes create network that allows you to ski from one mountain onto the next and then onto the next. In snidling, the 4 mountains were really well connected and because it is always my responsibility to find the right slopes, I took on the role of the navigator again. I had the map and it was me who figured out which way to go, which can be quite a task when you have 150 km of slopes right in front of you. But this was something I enjoyed and I readily laughed at Jani when he had no idea where we were.
This is the map I used every day, except mine was crumbled and torn.We never managed to ski on all 4 mountains in a day and one day we went so far that we almost couldn't get back to the first mountain on time. That would have been quite an issue, because then we would have had to find a way to get from one town to the other, without a car, to get to our car. I'm not saying it would have been impossible, but I never really felt like waiting for a skibus at the end of the day. You just want to take off your boots, go home and have a hot shower... So, that day, it was around 15.55 when we reached the top of Planai, the second mountain and we still had to get to our mountain, Hauser Kaibling. The problem was that there wasn't a direct path to the mountain, and you first had to ski down to a valley in between the two mountains and then you had to take a skilift to the next mountain and there was no other way out of the valley, a slope to ski down to the bottom of the mountain or anything like that (see slopes nr. 10 and 11 on Planai). We arrived to the bottom of the valley at 16.02, 2 minutes late, but the guys down there were quite nice and let us take our ride to the top of the mountain. Then, the moment we slid out the lift, they stopped it. I wonder how we would have got out of that valley if we arrived a little later. In any case it would have probably involved a bribe.
We drove to the Dachstein glacier twice (see the bottom right area of the map) and enjoyed the wonderfully winter atmosphere of it. Down in the valleys, where we lived and where the 4 mountains stood, only the slopes were covered in snow. They made some new snow every night and rearranged the existing amount so that the slopes would be in good condition every morning, but the rest of it melted. The hills weren't yet green because Spring hasn't really arrived yet, everything was a shade of grey and brown - not really inspiring, to be honest. But up there, everything was white and gorgeous. Sure, there were not that many slopes to ski on, but the density of people was also lower, so we had a lot of space just for ourselves. The only skilift that went up to the glacier was one of those glacier types, which look like a box. The box was attached to a single rope and there weren't any poles in between the top and the bottom station; making it hard to believe that the whole construction was stable enough. (There was a Hungarian woman at the bottom station who did not dare to come up, which is a little silly if you come all the way that far, although I do agree that it was scary. Scary but beautiful.)
This is what the skilift looked like from above.The place up there was truly wonderful. There were two large areas for Nordic skiing and you could see people doing large circles in the snow on the top of the glacier in the distance and the rest of the space was taken up by the slopes and lifts for Alpine skiing. The first day on the glacier was quite cold and windy, the second was simply windy (40 km/h) and when I leaned above the void at the edge of the rock and acted like Kate Winslet at the front edge of Titanic, the wind actually kept me from falling. That was a cool feeling. (There was a fence in front of me; I'm not totally insane.) Because Jani is a little more insane than I am, it was always him who initiated things like skiing in the freeride area dotted with rocks and going to an area where there were absolutely no signs of anyone having been in the past weeks.
This is me in the freeride area :)
This is Jani in the seemingly untouched area. We walked to the very edge, where the whole place simply ended in a vertical fall. Then and there, I was scared.
This is me in the freeride area :)
This is Jani in the seemingly untouched area. We walked to the very edge, where the whole place simply ended in a vertical fall. Then and there, I was scared.
