ben ben benko blog

Those Von Trapps were a hearty bunch

At the end of The Sound of Music the whole Von Trapp family escape Austria, right before it is annexed by Nazi Germany, by hiking over the Alps into Switzerland.

Last week we spent 8 days in the glorious Arlberg region of Austria. As this is the area of Austria that borders Switzerland I can only assume that the Von Trapps were hiking right where I was skiing which means that they scrambled through areas like this:



and this:



and this:



That was one tough family.

Luckily for our trip we came prepared with skis and boots and hats and long underwear and lots of Thinsulate. Since the days of the Von Trapps a bunch of nice people have also gotten together and built amazing ski lifts and gondolas and mountain houses where you can have all the hot spiced wine you want before hurtling down freshly groomed powdery slopes.

All of these wonderful amenities made for an amazing week. The weather was perfect. We skied through a could here and there but overall we had enough sun to require multiple daily applications of sunblock and allow at least one day of hatless skiing. I was definitely scared of the size of these mountains for the first day or two. I adjusted and only had a few fits of frustration that unfortunately mostly got taken out on H. Man is he patient with me. What a lucky lady I am to have him around the keep me going and push me to the next level when I want to give up. So overall my skiing improved a lot. I'm pretty proud of myself.

Then there were the mountains. They were like nothing I could have imagined and something that I'm still having trouble finding words for. The shear size of them was breathtaking. The sharp, steep, powerful rock faces covered in thick gentle snow was a sight I could marvel at for hours. I couldn't help day dreaming about what it would have been like to witness prehistoric rock plates crashing into eachother and rippling up in one amazing collision into what we see today. But you can see for yourself what I'm talking about. Here are a few more photos and there's a link at the end to the rest of our photos from our trip.

Here's a map of the whole area. Our ski passes covered all of these mountains and we tried almost all of them out. H definitely did the most skiing of our group and probably only missed one or two lifts on this whole map.



Thursday we headed up to the observation deck on Valluga, a mountain top that's one of the highest in the area at around 2,800 meters. We could almost see the Olympics from there. Here are two shots from the very top. You weren't really supposed to bring skis all the way to the top, but we saw quite a few nut balls ski off the left side of the first picture and find their own way down.





We stayed in a charming little town about 10 minutes from St. Anton. You can see our town somewhere down in the valley in this shot. Luckily there were beginner trails heading down from the tops of all of the mountains so I was able to take in these views with everyone else and still make it to the bottom in one piece.



I made a big giant batch of goulash (a type of beef stew) before we left and we stayed in a little apartment where we could snuggle down and have home cooked meals at night. Here we are enjoying said goulash and some local beer.



Here's the view from our front door on a foggy evening and a few more alps.


















And here's a link to more if you're not tired of this stuff yet.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bbbenko/sets/72057594072033891/

posted by Liz @ 3:24 PM