| BreakthroughOnSkis.com | Off the Beaten Piste: Austria's Zillertal, Part 2 | |||
all Zillertal photos
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Time Machine Zillertal contd... from the January 1999 issue The Zillertal is so big that there's room for a specialized beginner-novice area; room for a year-round glacier skiing zone; room for a rolling intermediate paradise like the Eggalm or an off-piste mecca like Gerlos. Unlike the western Alps, the big French ski domains like La Plagne or Les Trois Vallées, or Swiss megaresorts such as Verbier and Zermatt, where one vast arena of snow is crisscrossed and interconnected by lifts and pistes, the Zillertal is a very big collection of small ski resorts-so many and so different from one another that the final effect is about as big as the biggest Alpine ski offerings, but more intimate, warmer, easier to digest. Imagine a two week ski trip where you ski at a different ski area each day. Imagine the Zillertal. The intimacy has a strong Austrian accent. This is not generic skiing. You kick off your skis at lunch and go into a tiny chalet-restaurant at the edge of a snowy alm, and instead of rock-and-roll, either zither music or a yodel song greets you on the PA system. If by chance you're a German speaker, you realize that everyone in this valley talks in a wonderful, challenging idiosyncratic Tyrolian dialect. Even if you don't know a word of German (and it isn't necessary in this land where everyone seems to know English) that same singular local flavor comes at you in a hundred small details: the painted window decorations and wall murals; the barns still full of cows smack in the middle of sophisticated ski villages; the long-handled iron skillets of Tiroler Gröstl, the heartiest cheese and potato hash ever; and everywhere the music, in hotels, bars, restaurants, on the radio, in shops, traditional Austrian music, corny, cheerful, melodic, heart-tugging music-an oasis of regional culture in a world-wide sea of western pop. Time machine Zillertal. |
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| Finally now we've worked our way up to the top of the valley. Tux, with its glacier, its mini villages, its steep grass slopes. From the window of our hotel in Lanersbach we watch a farmer carry a 6-foot high bundle of hay in a giant basket backpack, down across a ski trail to the cows in his lower barn. Like other villages in the high Tuxertal, Lanersbach is both more primitive and more sophisticated than the bigger towns of the lower Zillertal. Hotels here are smaller, more expensive. Vacation packagers can't fit their bus-tour groups into these tiny villages. Parked cars in Lanersbach and Reid and Hintertux tend to be BMWs and Mercedes, not the Volkswagens and Fords of Mayrhofen. | ||||
 ....in the Vinotek |
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| Our host, Ewald Kraxner, owner of the Lanersbacherhof, proposes a unique après-dinner experience, a visit to his wine cellar, his Vinotek (a world removed from the noisy non-stop dancing-on-the-table parties of Dutch skiers in the lower valley). Loden capes are pulled from an antique armoire and, almost disguised as monks, we follow Herr Kraxner downstairs. Why the capes? "Well, I thought to myself that in a wine cellar only the wine should be on center stage, not fashion, neither sweatshirts nor jewelry-so now we are all the same; just wine pilgrims." Brick arches, candles, flickering shadows. One cave for Austrian wines, our host's first love, and one for a worldwide collection. Herr Kraxner, uncorks a series of Austrian wine treasures, wines that foreign visitors, and even most Austrians, can't find. "I visit each vineyard, he tells us, for three reasons: to see the vines, to see the wine cellar, and to meet the vintner and his family. I have this idea that one can't produce a balanced harmonious wine if one doesn't lead a balanced harmonious life.... Now, try this ice wine, it's made from grapes that are left on the vines till they freeze. Let the taste start at the tip of your tongue and work its way back to the throat, sweet but tart at the same time, isn't it...."
Lanersbach was like that. A series of exquisite moments. A shoe shop filled with antiques: old cow bells, carved masks, stuffed Alpine birds. A restored village church full of baroque frescoes. And always, whenever you looked up, the big white tongue of the Tuxer glacier, lapping down the steep box-canyon end of the valley. Not surprisingly, in drier years, the best skiing in the Zillertal is on the Tuxer glacier. |
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 ....on the Hintertux glacier |
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| "What do you do in summer?" I ask Sepp Erler, as we ride together up a chairlift suspended from strange gate-like towers floating directly on the glacier ice. "Oh, I teach skiing in summer too. No off-season for us. The glacier is open for skiing 365 days a year-unless the lifts are closed from high winds." Hard to imagine, skiing every day of the year. But Sepp skis with a kind of intuitive second sense, an unselfconscious perfection that must be a direct result of skiing every day of the year. I ask about burn-out. "No," Sepp replies, low-key, taciturn, almost deadpan except for smiling eyes, "it's always different." And then we slide out onto the windblasted slopes of the Gefrorene Wand (the "frozen wall"), point'em down, and let the long fields of glacier white roll past.
Skiing with Sepp I get an altogether new vision of classical Austrian skiing, stylized, elegant, polished. It isn't an accident, any more than these manicured valleys, immaculately preserved wooden houses, neatly tended forests are accidents. Traditional Austrian skiing style I realize has always been a natural expression of a traditional Austrian life style. The same words describe both: neat, tidy, careful, aesthetic, on purpose-very very on purpose. Austrians ski as precisely as they stack their firewood. Like their neighbors the Swiss, these people just aren't sloppy-not in their mountain communities, not on the slopes. A couple of afternoons on the Tuxer glacier gives us all the drama that a successful European ski trip requires. Runs long enough that legs start to protest. Snow good enough to provoke spontaneous grins. Strange boulevards of bulldozed snow leading one safely across a thicket of green ice and crevasses; a blue ice hole disappearing into the depths of the glacier. T-bars scattered around the high glacial cirque on floating towers. Steep moraines dropping from the end of the glacier down toward Hintertux. Giant mountain restaurants, the Tuxer Fernerhaus and the Sommerberg, like space colonies on a desolate white planet. And today, their terraces are full of skiers, weekend skiers. "You know about our weiss' Würstl Experten, the experts of the white sausage?" Sepp remarks dryly as we thread our way through the lunchtime crowd in quest of a bowl of speck-knoedel Suppe (bacon-dumpling soup). The what? "The Bavarians," Sepp explains, "our weekend skiers; we're only four hours drive from Munich here." But the white sausage experts are friendly. The high altitude sun warm. We follow our dancing shadows down the long smooth slopes, a privileged race in a privileged place.... |
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 ....back up the Hintertux glacier |
Zillertal, and the Tuxertal especially, is hard to say goodbye to. You want to stay. We want to stay. We toast our goodbyes with tiny glasses of "Wili," (pear Williams schnapps with a piece of pear in it) under the hand-hewn wooden beams of the Hühnerstahl, the "hen house" bar, beside us two students are playing a round of Nagln ("nailing") driving, or more accurately trying comically to drive nails into a stump with a hollow steel hammer that nearly always misses. The looser buys a round of Wili. Do we want to play? More laughter. More Wili. At some indeterminate hour we float out into the moonlit night, tiptoeing down narrow streets past the neatest stacks of firewood in the world, past the bakery, past the churchyard, the cemetery. The spectral glacier shinning milk-white at our backs. . . .
For more information on skiing the Zillertal, contact: |
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| BreakthroughOnSkis.com | Off the Beaten Piste: Austria's Zillertal, Part 2 | |||
| All contents of this web site © Lito Tejada-Flore unless otherwise credited. email: > lito@BreakthroughOnSkis.com |
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