The Search: Powsurfing at Arlberg (Austria)

Sometimes plans work out different than expected … but that´s good I guess ! You may end up somewhere really nice if you go nevertheless! In our case it meant that we ended up powsurfing at the Arlberg instead of going to ski treeruns in Switzerland and it turned out to be amazing!

The original plan for Ferdl (Ferdinand Winter) and me was to go to Switzerland. Snowforecasts looked good, until short before we wanted to leave – where a predicted 60 centimeters of snow became a maximum of 20 centimeters. Too less for good treeruns we thought … bummer! Should we go anyways? Yes! We thought we just start to drive and see were we end up. Well, we ended up at Arlberg the next day. It was snowing nicely when we arrived there and so we stayed since it was late anyways.

Good Morning!

Ferdl enjoying breakfast.

There was a little t-bar lift just where we slept. Ferdl was like: “I brought the powsurfer, should we take it for some laps with the t-bar? Looks like we can go without a ticket on this one!” The only reasonable answer from my side was: “Yeah sounds good“.  🙂

And that’s how a three days powsurfing session, with one day on skis inbetween, started.
We were just hiking up the slopes and then enjoyed terrain that we probably wouldn´t have looked at with skis on. It was my first time trying to powdersurf and it was super fun, nice to just play around and a big inspiration to see Ferdl ripping it!

Me, starting to feel it!

Ferdl … a true master on the powsurfer.

After that we met Arlberg Ski legend Hannes Schneider in Stuben … to be eaxact: we met his statue! I needed to give this ski-pioneer my greatest respect. I tried to ski with the kind of skis that oldschool pioneers like Hannes were riding with that day – so I got a glimpse of how they went down the mountains. You would not believe how difficult that is… I was happy to put my regular skiboots on afterwards again.

Thanks Ferdl for the great time, you´re a pure mountainman! And as a zen master said : “You gotta find the calmness in the burning house“ … we definitely did! 🙂