Skisteder i Austria

Austrian skiing is built around villages rather than purpose built stations, and the terrain reflects that. Most areas start in the trees at 800 to 1,200 m and climb to a rounded, open summit, which gives you sheltered runs on a storm day and long, wide motorway pistes when the sun is out. Grooming is the national obsession: Austrian pisteurs work overnight to a standard that makes early morning cord in the Tirol and Salzburgerland something skiers plan their week around. The lift stock is the newest in the Alps, with heated eight seaters and gondolas replacing drag lifts faster than anywhere else.

What Austria does not have, generally, is the high, treeless bowls of the Tarentaise. The exceptions matter: the Arlberg around St Anton and Lech has serious lift accessible off piste, Ischgl and Obergurgl sit high enough to hold cold snow through March, and the glaciers at Hintertux, Sölden, Kaprun and Stubai carry the season at both ends. For most visitors the appeal is a big linked area such as the Skiwelt or the Ski Circus at Saalbach where you can cover fifty kilometres in a day without repeating a run.

Off the pistes, Austria has the deepest menu of winter activity in the Alps. Almost every valley has a floodlit toboggan run, usually reached by a walk or a gondola with a hut halfway up serving schnapps before the descent. Cross country trails are groomed at valley level in the Tirol and extensively in the Salzkammergut and Seefeld, which hosted Nordic World Championships. Ski touring is a mainstream Tuesday evening activity here rather than a specialist pursuit, and many resorts mark a designated uphill route with its own parking. Add winter walking paths, ice skating on frozen village ponds, thermal spas at Längenfeld and Bad Gastein, and night skiing in Schladming and Mayrhofen.

Austrian mountain food is generous, cheap by Alpine standards and largely unchanged for decades. Lunch on the hill is usually a Jause of speck, cheese and dark bread, or a plate of Kasspatzln, the Tirolean cheese noodles served with fried onions. Gröstl, a pan of fried potato, onion and beef topped with an egg, is the classic après piste refuel. Frittatensuppe, clear broth with sliced pancake, appears on every hut menu, and Knödel come in every form: bread, speck, spinach, or sweet apricot in the Wachau tradition.

The pudding is the point of an Austrian ski lunch. Kaiserschmarren, shredded pancake dusted with icing sugar and served with plum compote, is ordered for a table to share and takes twenty minutes to arrive, so a good hut takes the order with the mains. Apfelstrudel and Topfenstrudel with vanilla sauce are the alternatives. In Vorarlberg and the Bregenzerwald look for Käsknöpfle and the local mountain cheeses from the alpine dairy cooperatives.

Drinking is a discipline of its own. Glühwein and Jagertee, black tea with rum, warm you on the terrace, while Obstler and Marillenschnaps arrive as a small glass at the end of a meal whether you ordered one or not. Beer is regional and taken seriously: Stiegl in Salzburg, Zipfer and Gösser elsewhere. The umbrella bar tradition, exemplified by the MooserWirt and the Krazy Kanguruh above St Anton, starts at three in the afternoon with a live band and finishes with several hundred people skiing back to the village in ski boots they never took off.

The Arlberg has the strongest claim to being the cradle of modern alpine skiing technique. Hannes Schneider, based in St Anton from before the First World War, developed the Arlberg technique of stem turns and codified it into a teaching progression that ski schools around the world copied. His 1930s films with Arnold Fanck put skiing in front of a mass audience. Schneider left for the United States in 1939 and helped establish Cranmore in New Hampshire, exporting the method wholesale.

Austria's competitive record is unmatched relative to its size. Innsbruck hosted the Winter Olympics twice, in 1964 and 1976, and the Tirol still uses the infrastructure. The Hahnenkamm downhill at Kitzbühel, run since the 1930s, is the most feared race on the World Cup calendar: the Streif drops off the Mausefalle at over eighty percent gradient in the first seconds and the winner's name carries more weight in Austria than an Olympic medal. Toni Sailer's three golds at Cortina in 1956, Franz Klammer's 1976 downhill at Innsbruck and Hermann Maier's crash and recovery at Nagano in 1998 are national reference points.

The village architecture is not a theme park invention. Timber farmhouses with painted facades, onion domed churches and the Lüftlmalerei frescoes of the Tirol predate skiing by centuries, and many of the huts you ski to are converted alpine dairies from a time when the high pastures were summer grazing. It is worth remembering that the lift network was largely built in the two decades after 1950, when tourism replaced subsistence farming as the economy of these valleys.