Brooke and Brian Visiting

Just dropped Brooke and Brian off at the train station on there way back to Munich where they will both catch flight back to CO. They had a great trip despite the worst winter in Garmisch that I have ever seen so here's a little recap with pictures that I took and pictures that I have stolen from Brian.

The first tour we got on was a small one to the Stuiben hutte which is the best tour in the area to go on with a bunch of jet legged friends and it actually turned out to have some good snow in near the hutte. 

Pretty good turns in the shade!

After this we spent the night drinking beer at local restaurants around Garmisch and got a little practice in slap dancing in.

Great band!

A few days later we headed to Austria for what was thought to be at the time 4 days of ski touring around the Silvretta but which turned into a 2 hour skin to the Heidelberger hutte for 2 beers, dinner and breakfast before we made our way back down. We did make some turns on a slope above the hutte but to say we skinned over 400 meters would be a stretch. I made 10 turns, skied up to Brooke and Brian and said,"fuck this, lets go to Italy".

You can see the hutte to the right of the big rock down there

Two hours after skiing out of the Heidelberger hutte we made it to the car, packed everything in, and got on the autobahn Italy bound. About an hour and a half in to the drive we realized we had no idea how to get to the place we wanted to go so we sucked it up and bought a map (people used to use these before gps) 

After a few hours we started rising up a pass right outside of Bozen and almost immediately it started dumping hard. I hadn't see the amount of snow that was there in a long time. There where roofs with over a meter of snow sitting on top of them.

One broken front light later (guard rail) and with nerves fried we rolled into the parking lot of the tourist information and got hooked up with a room with breakfast and dinner for 40 Euros a night. Perfect! 

We crashed hard the first night and woke up the next morning not knowing exactly where we were but happy that we had made it to a place with snow. We wandered out of the hotel and made our way for the bus stop and actually got the chance to ski down between hotels to the road. Once at the bus stop the owner of our hotel, Maria drove down and dropped us off our bus passes that we had no idea we would need. It all worked out and before long we were ski touring up some random road that was supposed to be made for snowshoers heading in an uncertain direction with tons of snow. An hour later we stumbled into a little village with a few restaurants that in summer even had a bus stop. We were in shock...

Some village....

Bus stop is out of commission.

 We ate a little food sitting on the patio and soon after were skinning towards a small grouping of trees that looked like excellent tree skiing about 100 meters from the huts. After 45 minutes of skinning we finally ripped the skins and started skiing and the snow was excellent! It felt like around 3 feet of snow and it was very light. The only thing that could have been better was having a little bit more of ski for how much we were skinning but it was fun anyways and we ended up doing around 4 laps before calling it a day and heading out back to the hotel for dinner and card games.

Lots of snow...that was a car.

The following day we headed towards Passo Pordoi which turned out to be an excellent time and a place that I would love to spend more time in the future. There was excellent snow in the shadows and almost too many lines to chose from.

Passo Pordoi skiing

After skiing back down to the hotel from Passo Pordoi we got the car gassed up for the trip ahead of us and drove back to the hotel to eat some dinner. We got to sleep early and got on the road after a small breakfast cruising all the way to the base of the Rauth Hutte on the Hohe Munde for a small ski tour to a hut to enjoy some food before heading back to Garmisch.

Group shot next to the Rauth Hutte with a friendly dog

Once back in Garmisch the two got their stuff together and I shuttled to the train station the next morning in order to catch their flight at the Munich Airport.

Overall a good trip even though the snow at the start was less than ideal!

-Owen