Skiing on a glacier

Austria offers a few glaciers prepared for skiing. One of them is in the south-west of Tyrol, in the valley called Kaunertal.

Kaunertal is a tiny valley at around 1.000 meters above sea level, but the ski slopes starts at 2.200 meters. The valley although spectacular is nothing very special in Austrian terms: high, rocky mountains left and right, some smaller waterfalls, a creek, a hand full of villages.

More than half of the buildings in this valley are small pensions or hotels, and the rest are farm houses or small businesses. As you can imagine, the valley is a quite place, except for some special ski and snowboard events which draw thousands of winter sport fanatics to this place. Then the prices goes up and you may have to seek for a bed further down in the valley.

Skiing on a glacier is fun, at least for the not so skilled one. Slopes tend to be very broad like multiple highways, and flat. This is ideal to test ski material for your upcoming ski race season or to improve your basic skiing skills. For the advanced skier this is not much challenge.

Nevertheless, you will find what you need. There are a lot of different slopes, and depending of the day time also with different type of snow. For snow boarders, this ski region is awesome: halfpipes, race tracks, jumps of all size, just great. But take care: during an one-hour break on a sun-soaked bench, rescue helicopters landed three times to pick up hurt snow boarders.

This is another plus factor: the sun. If you have a nice weather, you will get a lot of sun. Up on the glacier, there are no shadows, no trees, just snow and sun the complete day. Take your sun cream and good sun glasses with you!

This slopes are great for carving, and you can also go for some ski tours, but the only one potential track I saw was not a spectacular one. I love skitouring, but not on this glacier.