This year has had a promising start with two weeks of Kenya in January and more recently two weeks of snow in Austria. The first week was in Kirchberg (Kitzbühler Alpen) in the great company of fifteen friends including Mayke, which was a week of great fun, great weather to begin with but not so great weather later on with some rain-skiing (enjoyable for those that enjoy getting wet and going slowly). Fortunately Olaf K. and I had a second week lined up in Saalbach-Hinterglemm which turned out to be a week full of fresh snow. Halfway through the week we were joined by Adriaan, who turns out to be an absolute powder addict.

His powder addiction brought us mostly off-piste and often through woods, which occasionally also gave rise to (minor) complications involving ski-throwing, sliding, stumbling, hanging onto trees, sliding through barbed wire, wading through mountain streams and skiing on what looks initially like snow but turns out to be soil with a thin layer of snow to cover it up. I personally discovered a new turning-method by jumping into a tree and swivelling your ski’s round – great if you need to turn around but the slope won’t allow you to. Adriaan discovered a new way of going past fallen-over trees, which involves a summersault over the tree in question. Best executed by starting off with a jump over another fallen-over tree higher up.

All in all, great fun, rounded off with a day of head-deep powder in Kaprun (and unfortunately for Olaf a rock that got slightly too friendly with his snowboard) and a fun-in-the-woods filled Easter Monday in Zell-am-See. The homeward journey also turned out to involve lots of powder, on which we felt very comfortable thanks to the previous week of powder-only skiing.

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