Powder! at Alpbachtal, Austria

Ok, so I've been complaining about the snow here the last two posts. Well, we finally got into some deep powder today! We also had unbelievable weather. It was probably just below freezing so the snow was good and we were plenty warm. I went on the ski bus with the Munich Ski Club with a few friends this time. My friends Justin, Kinsey, Chris and his fiance Kerry, and their friend Erika joined us this weekend for a trip to Alpabchtal, Austria (Kinsey and Chris are from Chicago and also work for EY). It is east of Innsbruck and about an hour and a half from Munich by bus. So, back to the powder...the runs were pretty packed down, but Justin and I went to the backside and found quite a bit of "boot-high" powder for a change just off the marked runs. Justin is a really good skiier, so he definitely pushes me to do things I normally wouldn't do (hence one of the reasons I got a helmet!). Anyway, everyone else took lessons, so Justin and I skiied together all day and had a wonderful day of skiing! Needless to say, I'm going to be feeling this one in my thighs tomorrow!

Alright, so Justin decided it would be a good idea to take this one unmarked trail (are you getting the general theme here!) that had really deep powder, so of course I followed him. Well, let's just say we crossed 2 barbed-wire fences on the way and had to go over/around a few hay bales. Yeah, not really something we should have been on! So anyway, we came to this one area where there was no way down but STRAIGHT down on a path no wider than our skis that was really icy. This picture doesn't do it justice, but Justin went first and tried to go down as far sideways as he could to keep his speed down. Well, you can see where he ended up. So I of course tried to go straight down and take the "jump" at the bottom instead. Yeah....I made the jump alright, but I landed in such deep powder that I literally did a summersault and ended up in a very similar position to him, but on the other side of the tree at least. What a fun day! It's probably good that nobody had a video camera or we might have made America's Funniest Home Videos a time or two...or at least America's Stupidest Videos, one of the two!

Where's Justin?
HA!, there he is...buried!