Brock & Jane's Epic Powder Adventure in St. Anton

Today was a bluebird day, cold to start but quite warm to finish, with brilliant sunshine.

We were asked to meet our guide, Eric Falch, at 9:00 a.m. and we were early. When he arrived, he gave us avalanche gear to carry and wear, and then we headed over to the Rendlbahn. We waited until 9:30 a.m. for the lift to open. An enormous crowd was lined up at the Galzigbahn; our crowd was much smaller.

Eric had a plan. The Rendlbahn lift carries you to a mountain across the street. We then took the Gampberg chair, which had been closed yesterday. That meant that there was 8" of fresh powder waiting for us at the top of this chair!

What followed was an epic powder run with fresh tracks for almost 2000 vertical feet. The trail required mountaineering and expert skills to work through tight woods near the bottom, then to trail-out over the street and back to the Rendlbahn. Eric was a beautiful skier and a great guide. Brock and I skied very well through the powder. The pictures say it all:

This is what we were about to ski:

You can see our tracks behind me:

The part in the woods reminded me of "Outer Limits" at Big Sky:

We were ducking under branches, and I took a few branches to the face!

The first run took about an hour to complete. For the second run, we repeated the lifts but took a different course along the side of the mountain:

We weaved through some avalanche fences and skied right to the edge of the abyss:

Our tracks are behind me:

The views in every direction were stunning:

We almost had to kill ourselves to avoid the hordes of crazy Europeans snarfing our lines by the end of this run, and after an exhausting trail-out, we were getting quite tired. This run also took an hour to complete.

These two runs were among the most amazing we've ever skied. We would never have found them without the guide.

Once across the street, we took a different lift up and skied down to a lively hut for lunch and recharging.

We should have stopped at that, but Eric tried one more run on the other side with us. The first area he had in mind was officially closed, though hundreds of people were disregarding the "closed" sign and skiing it, without the proper avalanche gear.

Here we are by the "closed" sign, as many people scooted under the barrier:

The area where Eric took us next was tracked out, sticky (due to rising temperature), and very difficult to ski. I was most successful when following exactly in his tracks.

We got some good photos of the valley and the town, Schnann, where Eric lives:

Here is Rendl mountain where we skied in the morning:

Overall, this hour-long run was a bust. We were exhausted, and the run finished with a long walk back to St. Anton and our hotel, while carrying our ski's.

In retrospect, this may have been the best day of the year to do what we did. We had some quality fresh track turns on our first two runs. There were many other people doing the same thing, so, much like Jackson Hole, after about two hours all of the fresh tracks were gone.

We were a little hard on ourselves for wearing out so quickly. But 2 hours of hard skiing was about our limit in Big Sky. And let's face it, Brock is almost 60 and I'm almost 59! So I feel like we did pretty darn good for our ages. We skied beautifully and were well guided by Eric.

Our swim and nap back at the hotel were much needed!

Total vertical feet skied: 12,441 feet. Skiing one lap off the Rendlbahn was the approximate equivalent of skiing from the top of Lone Peak to the base in Big Sky. We did that twice, and then some.