Dave's Photo & Travelblogue

Carving Masters 20X!

This winter (or spring, rather?) I went to my first hardboot snowboard carver meetup. Carving Masters in Soelden was fantastic fun! The weather was good for 3 of 4 days. I demoed snowboards from Virus, Apex, F2, Goltes, and Oxess.

Most of the time I talked in German, so I really improved my skillz. We stayed in a great Pension (Bed & Breakfast) that was quite cheap, and right in the town center.

Here are a couple of choice still photos:

And, a gallery with the best few photos of each person that passed by:

Carving Masters 2010

Action photos were taken with a Nikon D90 and the 18-200mm VR lens. Should anyone want a full-res photo of themselves, just leave a comment here and tell me which rider you are! Videos may have to wait a few months until I’m back from my round-the-world trip.

Thanks to all the organizers at Frozen Backside, and to the vendors who made such a great effort and let us try their boards free of charge!

About Carving Masters

• See the official Carving Masters website here, though it will be a while before any information about CM 2011 is available.
• You can also find information about Carving Masters on the Frozen Backside hardboot forum.
• I can highly recommend staying at Pension Andre Arnold in Soelden. Clean and modern rooms, an excellent location, and a reasonable price. It’s run by a 4-time pro world ski champion! Imagine winning the world championships 4 years in a row from 1978-1981. Impressive.
• Try “Die Alm” at your own risk – we had the most rude service ever from the bartender there. Literally, I’ve never seen such bad service in my entire life, except perhaps once in Blacksburg, VA when a waitress told us (when our food was VERY slow coming) “It’ll come when it comes. I don’t run the kitchen.”

Climbing Zugspitze: Germany’s highest mountain (Part 3)

In case you didn’t see Part 1 and Part 2, that’s because they were published quite a while ago. I’ve been busy with snowboarding, and decided that this final post & video about a summer hike would anyway fit better once spring arrived.

After crossing the Höllentalferner glacier, we continued climbing up the wall for a long time.

As we neared the top this beautiful view greeted us:

Here’s the Eibsee, which we could also see briefly from the train on the way down.

Now, for the final video. High-def views over the Höllental and everything beyond!

Watch “Climbing Zugspitze: Part 3” in HD on YouTube. A big thanks to Danny Galixy for letting me use some of his fantastic instrumental music for these three videos!

We made one slight error, in that we planned to hike back down. But the ascent went slower than expected with our acrophobic friend, so we took the train down instead. That would have been no problem, except that we’d left some sleeping bags and shoes at the hut, planning to pick them up on the way down.

So… after arriving back to the car in Hammersbach, Scott and I did a lightning-fast hike up the bottom section of the mountain. This time we chose to go via the Höllentalklamm, a gorge with a river, instead of the longer (but fee-free) Stangensteig. When I say lightning-fast, I mean the signpost said 2 1/2 hours, and we did it in 1:15. Our Smartwool shirts were soaked with sweat!

In the end I’m glad we did this bottom section twice, because the Höllentalklamm was gorgeous! You walk up narrow staircases cut into the rock, with splashing waterfalls and scenic views everywhere. I’d recommend if you are hiking up and down, to go up Höllentalklamm and down Stangensteig to take in both scenic routes.

For the full details about the hike, where to stay, where to rent gear, and all that – check out Part 1 of this series. The end of that post has all the hard facts listed in English for your Babelfish-free understanding. Part 2 of the Zugspitze series is all about the via ferrata sections (where you’re clipped to the steel cables on the cliffside) and the glacier.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading and seeing what Zugspitze is like. Let me know if you have any questions I can answer about the hike or the mountain! I’m happy to help fellow English speakers figure this baby out, because almost all the information out there is in German (grin).

Carving up the Glacier

While a volcano melts the glacier in Iceland, carvers are cutting up the Austrian glaciers on raceboards! Here’s Lowcarver this past weekend, riding his Virus snowboard at Hintertux…

Below is a gallery of the best carving photos from Hintertux (and a couple of a friend who skis). I can’t wait for Carving Masters in just one week at Soelden! Hopefully I’ll get great shots and video of lots of carvers there.

For more on Hintertux, please see this earlier post with info of how to get there.

Photos were taken with a Nikon D90, 18-200mm VR lens, and a circular polarizing filter.

Hintertux Carving Apr 2010

See Ronny tear up the pistes!
			Alright, the album’s about snowboard carving but Andy was doing well here too!
Another nice one of Andy	Awesome shot of Ronny
Lots of Willi’s!

Around The World Update

As my regular readers may remember, I’m doing a trip around the world this summer! Here’s an update of the itinerary:

If you’re in any of these spots at the same time, let me know, perhaps we can meet!

So, what’s left on my to-do list? A LOT, believe me! I need malaria tablets, zip ties, luggage locks, DEET bug repellant, a few more vaccinations… and I have to learn a bit of Spanish and Japanese.

What can you expect from the blog while I’m on this trip? I’m not 100% sure yet, but here are some of the ideas I’ve been kicking around:

• Short post with a photo-a-day (delayed slightly due to spotty internet access)
• Tales about a bottle of Blair’s Death Sauce I’ll bring with me (haven’t decided what flavor)
• Mini-reviews of the places where I stay: mostly hostels
• Descriptions of hikes and other sights I see (maybe after I return from the trip)
• Anything else you’d like to see or hear? Leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do!

I’m also interested to get any special tips you might have about the countries I’ll visit. To give you some ideas, I’ll start with a few of my own hot tips from the last year:

• Hong Kong: Sushi One has half-price sushi after 10pm. And it’s some of the best sushi I’ve ever had, with a huge selection of a la carte items I’d never seen before!
• Taiwan: In the town of Hualien, near Taroko Gorge, there’s a huge restaurant with fantastic (and cheap) food. It’s full of locals, and it was super-tasty. Probably a taxi driver could find this full-city-block restaurant:

http://twhl.inbegin.com/html/front/bin/ptdetail.phtml?Part=chfood0025

• Austrian Alps: Fantastic skiing can be had during the pre- and post-season at Hintertux Glacier. For the non-skiers they have a very cool limestone cave at the Spannagelhaus, and an Ice Palace cave at the very top of the mountain. The limestone cave (and probably ice palace as well) are open all year round, in case you’re a summer visitor.
• Vienna: You must see the Iron Man near Vienna’s Rathaus (city hall). There are hundreds of thousands of nails pounded into this wooden statue and pedestal.

http://traveldave.com/index.php/2010/01/ironman-lives-in-vienna/

Happy traveling on your own vacations, and hope to see some of you along the way!

Hot Snowboard Carving

Alright, you’ve probably seen a few videos like my latest craziness from February. For March I decided to put up some D-SLR snowboard carving photos taken with the Nikon D90 and 70-300mm VR lens. For all those riding hardboots, check these out! Raceboards are one major step faster than freeride boards, and provide superior stability and grip to carve serious trenches in the snow at high speed.

Here Peter shows off some really amazing turns on his Oxess snowboard… first the frontside,

And now the backside turn (I swear it’s not a mirror image of the frontside photo!),

I think my body doesn’t turn far enough to be able to kiss the snow on the backside… heh. Here are a few shots of the author; you can see I’m not as practiced as Peter (and I wasn’t as confident on the bumpy/slushy snow we had later in the day when Bernd took these shots of me).

My Virus Xtremecarver snowboard grips like mad. I think I just need to learn to ride it better. The frontside turn, as always, is easier than the backside:

If any carvers out there have some advice how I can improve my technique, please do leave a comment here! I have a feeling my stance may need adjustment, and I need to turn my upper body more on the backside turns.

Lastly, here’s Bernd on his trusty (~15-year-old) F2 Speedster SL. I’m curious how he’d do on a Silberpfeil, one of the most known factory-standard carving boards.

And the tricky backside turn:

Below you’ll find a whole album with many more photos from all three of us. Enjoy, and leave a comment if you have some helpful advice about technique! (I’m the second rider).

Carving in Hochzillertal 2010

Frostbite and the Captain Morgan Twins

The snow this winter isn’t that bountiful, so I’ve been quite often to nearby glacier ski resorts. I’ll give a few details later about the charming town of Lanersbach in the Zillertal valley. But first you have to see the temperature at the top of Hintertux Glacier on our first day:

“Heiter” usually means fair, clear, or bright. But in this case the sign was WRONG. Outdoors it was cloudy, snowing lightly, and the wind was blowing at 40-50km/h (up to 30mph). –22C equates to –8F… and the wind chill, well, that was around –38C (–37F). Keep in mind that’s before accounting for the speed we were moving downhill (directly into the wind). I got a bit of frostnip on my ears, so I wore a liner cap under my helmet on the following days. “Gefrorene Wand” was quite accurate on this trip: Frozen Face!

It wasn’t all snow and frostbite. One evening we went to Kleine Tenne in Lanersbach, and found that Captain Morgan Austria was there with the Captain Morgan Twins and their bikinis! Paul was kind enough to pose for a photo with the twins.

Good music, a kicker (foosball) table, and Zillertal Pils made it a great night, although we were a bit too tired from the cold to party like rock stars. We made it back to the Kleine Tenne one more night, when the Bavarian party band Chari Vari was there… although none of our group was a big fan of the folky-rock style with double accordions.

The rest of the trip was all about skiing and snowboarding. Here is a choice view from the quad chairlift above Sommerberg, where you can see the neighboring T-bar:

And, on the last day, this beautiful view of Hintertux greeted us upon arrival. You can just see the moon over the peaks toward the left side of the picture.

Getting to Lanersbach:

• Here’s a Google map of Lanersbach. I highly recommend Lanersbach if you’re going to Hintertux for an extended trip. It’s about 10-15min drive to the mountain base by car or ski bus, and you have a much wider selection of nightlife and restaurants than in Hintertux itself. The town is about 2h drive from Munich, and a little less from Innsbruck.
• There is a Spar grocery store in Lanersbach, but beware, in Austria the stores close very early (6:00pm I believe).
• Restaurants are plentiful, and we went to several on the one-way street (north of the main street). Hermanns Klause restaurant (associated with a bed & breakfast) had tasty food, but was smoky. The restaurant at Hotel Jaeger had a non-smoking area, salad bar, and excellent food. As one of our party was sick at home, they even made a “to-go” entree and gave us a real plate & silverware with it. Of course, one night we went up the hill to Madseit to our favorite: Alte Huette at Hotel Berghaus. I had a fantastic lamb schnitzel, a dish I’d never seen before.
• Kleine Tenne had a good number of people on both Friday and Saturday nights. We were lucky that it wasn’t too smoky, but don’t expect a non-smoking nightclub in Austria. There was another nightclub next door that we didn’t try out, so clearly there is some party potential in Lanersbach if you’re there on the right week/weekend.
• Skiing possibilities abound: you can ski Eggalm right in Lanersbach, try Rastkogel or Finkenburg a few km down the valley, go up the valley to Hintertux, or even drive 20min down to Mayrhofen for a larger-town experience (and Austria’s steepest prepared ski slope “Harakiri” with 78% grade!).

If you give Lanersbach a try, I hope you enjoy the trip, and come back here to tell us about it!

Being Frozen in Stubai

When you think of a glacier, you probably already think “cold.” But of the many days I’ve spent at glacier ski areas this year, none were colder than this past Sunday and Monday at Stubai. The temperature was about –15 to –20C (that’s 5F to –4F) on Sunday, and in the evening the winds picked up. Monday the wind chill must have been way below –20C, even though the temps warmed up a few degrees. Check out the snow being blown from the peaks:

Now, don’t get the impression it wasn’t FUN! This was one of the best ski weekends I’ve had this year (from 18 days snowboarding so far). The snow was perfect for carving, and off-piste there was about a foot of powder.

For those wishing to travel to Stubai, don’t expect huge nightlife. The nearest big town is Neustift im Stubaital, and it’s nothing like Mayrhofen, St. Anton, or Sölden for nightlife. We stayed in a small Pension in Milders, near Neustift. “The Farm,” the big apres-ski place in Milders, had a total of 3 people at 9:30pm (and they were all smoking). However, BIG PROPS to Restaurant Steinadler, which we found was non-smoking. That’s very rare for Austria. Besides that, the food was fantastic. Here was my Cordon Bleu (which also came with a salad plate and a side of cranberry sauce):

I had a surreal experience there. I dropped my fork, and as I looked around for our server (maybe 7 seconds later), there she came – with a new fork. Apparently she had heard it from the other room, and recognized the difference between fork and knife hitting the ground. Amazing!

Pensions (= Bed & Breakfasts) vary quite a bit throughout Germany and Austria, but in my experience you’re guaranteed a decent bed and a simple breakfast for a bargain price. Our pick in Milders was okay, but a few features might turn off some travelers. Ask yourself: what percentage of today’s Americans would physically be able to sit down on this toilet!?

The next morning we went back out for more adventure on the slopes. It was a windy day, but once we were on the slopes (wind at our backs) it was great. I figured out the settings on my bindings and boots to let me carve like crazy on my Virus Xtremecarver, leaning all the way over so my nose was almost touching the snow on every turn. And the views were fantastic!

Check out this distant mountain formation which looks like a bowl full of clouds:

Getting to Stubai

• See this Google Map for the location of Stubai; you’ll find Neustift im Stubaital along the road leading to it. Note that it’s 16km or so from Neustift (the nearest large town) to Stubai.
• Pensions (= Bed & Breakfasts) are a great place to stay. Usually the proprietors are very friendly and helpful. Often the room is fantastic for the price; although sometimes it’s a bit lacking in one area or another. Occasionally you find “WC im Flur” which means a shared bathroom in the hall, but you’ll often save €5-10 a night for such a room.
• I highly recommend the restaurant Steinadler in Milders. Non-smoking, fantastic food, friendly service, and psychic at bringing replacement forks. From the card I picked up there, I found they also have a Pension with a quite reasonable room rate (€24 per person for double room with breakfast; even cheaper in the summer at €20). Google map here. Milders is a cheap taxi ride from Neustift central, in case you’re there on a weekend and want to try for bigger nightlife than “The Farm” apres-ski in Milders.

Beautiful Views at Hintertux Glacier

If you’ve been reading for a while, you probably saw my post about Hintertux just as this winter began. In past years, I’ve only gone there when the other areas didn’t have enough snow. But this year I went back mid-season and found piles of the stuff, way deeper POW than the other resorts at lower altitudes.

Here are a few scenic shots:

The clouds were quite amazing at times on Sunday, as a storm cleared off.

In my last Hintertux post I mentioned extreme weather. Well, here’s the result when it’s –15C with snow in the air. Oh, let’s not forget, the whole top of the mountain was in a cloud.

After I melted all this ice out of my beard, I gave up and put on my neoprene facemask. Heh.

Pictures are all from my trusty Canon SD1000. That little camera has gone more vertical miles in my pocket than any other piece of electronics I own. And despite my taking the occasional hard spill on an icy slope, it’s still unscathed!

Since I love these shots, and don’t have any particular “favorite photo” (how would one choose?), the frozen beard goes out to Wendy from down under!

Snowboard Carving – Feb Craziness!

Alright, it’s finally time for a little taste of what’s possible with my final video setup! I just threw together a couple good carving clips from two trips, one in early Jan and one in early Feb.

Go to YouTube to watch the video in HD!

Thanks to the amazing carvers in the video: Peti, Lowcarver, and Alexey. They ride boards from Oxess, Virus, and Prior. I need to improve my technique to get those nice, laid-over turns, especially on the backside!

The first clip is at Zillertal Arena, the rest are at Hintertux glacier (both in Austria). Next week I’ll post a bit more about my Canon HF200 camera setup, so if you want to read about that, subscribe with the orange buttons on the left sidebar for RSS or email notification. Hope you enjoy the video!

Powder in Kitzbuehel, Austria

Kitzbühel has always had a special meaning for me, because that’s where my Mom learned to ski many years ago. She was studying in Europe, and had the chance to ski in Austria one winter. Now, some ~40 years later, I live about an hour and fifteen minutes’ drive from there!

The mountain is surrounded by several quaint little towns: Jochberg, Kitzbühel, and Kirchberg im Tirol, among others. One of its strengths is the huge amount of open, ungroomed terrain, which is fantastic when there is new snow.

Under the lifts C1 and C2 (which arrive, respectively, at the tops of Steinbergkogel/1973m and Ehrenbachhöhe/1796m), there are a lot of steep inclines with few trees (sorry, no picture). Beware when there’s not enough snow; but normally by mid-winter it’s full of POW and ready for freshies whenever there’s a 6-12” dump.

Here’s a shot near one of the many lifts to Ehrenbachhöhe near the end of the day:

Getting there:

• Google map to my favorite starting lift, Fleckalmbahn (a gondola).
• I found this incredibly geeky website which has a database of lifts. The link takes you to Steinbergkogel, complete with pictures of the slope below the lift. I love it!
• Here’s a picture of the area below Steinbergkogel, where I think the best powder runs are. On the right, and in the bottom of the picture, where you see the shadows – that’s it!