Life may be a beach but summer skiing in the Alps, even on a glacier, is a whole new experience

It’s just before 8:30am on Wednesday 5 July, and while half of Europe is preparing to head to the beach, I’m at the bottom of the gondola that leads to Austria’s 2,700m Dachstein Glacier, buying ski passes.

“What’s the snow like up there?” I ask the girl behind the counter. Her reply – “please don’t ask me that!” followed by an apologetic giggle – doesn’t exactly bode well for the day ahead, but to be fair it is the middle of summer. The temperature down below us in the Enns Valley is around 25C, here at 2,057m it must be somewhere in the high teens already, and even up on the glacier itself it’s forecast to reach 10C later in the day. People don’t go skiing or snowboarding here at this time of year because they want to score deep, fresh, cold smoke powder. This is going to be a novelty session, and pretty much everything about the Dachstein summer ski and board experience feels novel.

Even some of the locals seem to think what we’re doing is a little odd. As my friend Stefan and I pull on our salopettes in the car park, a middle-aged mountain man with the complexion of a walnut, sensibly dressed in shorts and T-shirt and wielding a pair of walking poles, grins over at us and says something that loosely translates as “what the hell are you doing?” Perhaps he has a point, I think, as I smile back at him. Even with my salopettes only halfway on, my backside already feels like it’s on fire. A moment later, I realise I’m sitting on an electric fence. On the other side, cows graze contentedly in an idyllic Alpine meadow, their cowbells clanking out a lazy symphony.

The Dachstein Südwandbahn, the gondola that takes you up to the glacier, is quite a feat of engineering, even by the standards of Alpine ski

resorts. Built almost entirely out of glass to give the best possible views, its cabins can whisk 50 passengers from cow fields to snowfields in just six minutes at a speed of 43kph. There are no pillars to take the strain along the route – it’s just one long cable – and the top station, set into a vertiginous pinnacle of rock, looks like something out of a 1970s Bond film. During the summer months the gondola is popular with hikers, climbers and tour bus parties as well as late-season snow-sliders, so there’s a (free) advance booking system to help keep queuing to a minimum. When you arrive, it’s worth timing your entry to the loading area so that you’re one of the first passengers to board – ten people per trip get to experience the gondola’s “convertible feeling” by riding in an open-air compartment on the roof.

Once you’re on the glacier itself, it soon becomes apparent that the main attraction – after the cafe selling

krapfen (German for “super-sweet donuts the size of your face”) – is the Dachstein Superpark. When we were there the extra-large kickers were out of action due to the deteriorating snow conditions (the season ended just a few days later, on 9 July) but there was still plenty to keep the extraordinarily skilful local crew entertained, from a beginner area with a couple of easy boxes and some small kickers to an advanced zone packed with an array of rails and other features.

The pistes on the glacier aren’t very long, but they are well-groomed right through the year. By July the longest pisted descent, a red which runs from the gondola station to the bottom of the glacier’s only chairlift, was closed because the bottom third was in the process of turning into a pond, but the runs near the top of the glacier were still in surprisingly good condition. True, it’s possible to get down most of them in under 30 seconds, but with all the attention focused on the park, you’re at least likely to have them to yourself.

The Dachstein gondola is also the gateway to more serious pursuits. There are various ski touring routes that start on the glacier, including the Edelgriess, an 18km descent from the Dachstein massif to the village of Ramsau, and the 25km Austrian national ski tour, which takes you across the glacier to Hallstadt. The best time to attempt these routes is in spring and guides are available locally.

In summer, however, the glacier feels more like a place for relaxation than adventure. While stuffing ourselves with krapfen before heading back to the heat of the valley, we watched an elderly lady in a red jacket lapping a short red run all by herself, making smooth, graceful turns across what was effectively her own private piste.

Of all the people on the glacier at that moment, she seemed to be having the most fun.■