Hinterstoder, AT: 02/05/19

jamesdeluxe

Administrator
As mentioned in my Wurzeralm TR, I decided to take advantage of the fact that it had a sister ski area only three or so miles away as the crow flies, Hinterstoder, and that day passes were valid at both, which share the same unfortunate 1980s logo font:

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While on a t-bar with a local for a final run at Wurzeralm, I asked him about Hinterstoder; he said that it was a far more mainstream ski mountain with a big base area and extensive lodging/condos in the village. He also warned me that it'd be pretty busy during a school holiday. Oh well, I'd already made up my mind to check it out so off I went. When I put the new destination into my GPS, it said 25 minutes drive time -- the topography didn't allow a straight shot between the two places so you had to take an indirect route via the autobahn.

I arrived around 1 pm and grabbed a parking spot only a few steps from the gondola that takes you halfway up. As always, the compressed trail map below makes the lift-served terrain look small but that's a continuous 4,600-vert lift-served drop (I went T2B twice) and 1.3 miles wide. It reminded me quite a bit of Copper Mountain in Colorado -- similar layout, size, base village, popular amongst families, near a major highway, facing directly north, a wide variety of terrain mostly skewed toward intermediates with a handful of legitimately steep runs (of course, Copper has more marked trails).
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All over the resort were adverts selling consumer products:
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At mid-mountain, they were holding a demo day with four different brands: Head, Atomic, Fischer, and Salomon. If I'd had more time, I would've given a pair or two a test drive; however, I didn't want to spend 15 or so minutes going through the process.
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On that note: it's always interesting to check out which brands are popular in a given region. For example, in much of Switzerland, Völkl is the hometown brand and you'll see them everywhere; in France, Rossignol rules; I assume that in the Pacific Northwest you see a lot of K2s. Here in the midwest of Austria, it wasn't even close; Head was the preferred ski. From seeing thousands of skiers over the course of the week, I'd anecdotally guestimate that Head has 40% of the market share there, possibly more, presumably because Austrians are born racers and it's such a huge part of their native skiing culture.

Another observation was that my preferred brand, Kästle, was a total no-show. During my entire week-long visit, I did not see one single pair of Kästle skis other than mine -- how's that possible with its headquarters only 200 miles away in the Arlberg? I even saw several people on new-school Volants.

Back to the report: even though there was a big crowd, by using the singles line I got on the high-speed sixer in three minutes and all other lifts were ski-on:
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For the most part, the groomed trails were in decent shape; however, due to the holiday traffic, steeper sections were skied off so wherever possible I stayed in the ungroomed, which was nice and soft. As you can see, views of the valley and surrounding peaks were gorgeous and no there was no inversion woodstove smoke:
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The upper mountain, served by two consecutive t-bars, is above treeline. The surface lifts keep crowds away, allowing pleasant low-angle skiing up there.
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In contrast, the main autobahns were a bit crowded.
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A nice feature was long descents, a thousand verts at a time, through perfectly spaced larches with chalky snow from four days earlier:
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My final trip descent at 4 pm with shadows encroaching on most of the runs:
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While Hinterstoder is a third-tier industrial ski area, if I'd gone during an offpeak period, I imagine that it'd be easy to rack up lots of vert with plenty of enjoyable offpiste on the upper half of the mountain.
 
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