The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
It’s never too late to be a downhill racer
Midlife skier Mike MacEacheren channels his inner Winter Olympian by tackling the world’s longest marked ski circuit – at high speed, and in a single day
Bucket-list ski circuits are hardly a new trend in Austria, and there is history aplenty of resorts marketing their most famous pistes as once-in-a-lifetime journeys. The Hochkönig area near Salzburg proposes the 35km Königstour (King’s Tour) around the peaks of Maria Alm, Dienten and Mühlbach, while Skicircus Saalbach Hinterglemm Leogang Fieberbrunn in the neighbouring valley suggests the Challenge, a 65km marathon stretching into deep Tirolean country. Another for beginners is the 12km Tauern Circuit encompassing magnificent Obertauern. All are pitched somewhere between the competitive and the contemplative.
The latest and longest by far is the new KitzSkiWelt Tour, which might feel fabricated but has been here all the time. It not only gives a new perspective on familiar slopes, but links to those that are undiscovered – and that is the thrill of it. Your reward is the freedom to Grand Prix across a piste map that gives the sense of being infinite. Here’s how my day unfolded:
9am
In my head, I was Dave Ryding. I was Alain Baxter, Martin Bell and Graham Bell. I was Konrad Bartelski. Hell, I was even Eddie the Eagle. I was thinking about the Winter Olympic heroes of British skiing, having just begun the world’s longest marked ski circuit, while bombing down a piste towards Kitzbühel in the Austrian Tirol. I was chasing the turns of Peter Zass, a guide from Snow-Academy Jochberg, and the piste was as polished as one would want it. Smooth enough to straightline and yet icy enough to glide at worrying speed straight into a thicket of limb-cracking evergreens and then into an air ambulance. Channel the World Cup-winning cool of Dave Ryding, I thought.
The sun cast the teeth-baring mountains of the Wilder Kaiser ahead in a glow and, after two winters off, my legs meant I had to focus hard on my turns rather than the view. To do otherwise would have meant a high-speed smash equivalent to hitting a motorway crash barrier. Easily, we were skiing at over 90km (56 miles) per hour.
We had set off early from Mittersill, 20km south of Kitzbühel and the home of the Blizzard ski factory. The town styles itself as a gateway to the Hohe Tauern National Park, a mountain-littered landscape topped out by the Grossglockner (3,798m/12,460ft), Austria’s highest peak. But at just after 9am, we were alone with the mountains and our route ahead was an 88km out-andback circuit of groomed runs, a scrawl of blue, red and black squiggles on the coupled KitzSki and SkiWelt piste maps.
The plan was to ski without pause, from first lift to last, above a dozen quiet ski villages near empty of tourists, finishing for schnitzel and schnapps back where we started. The sheer number of pistes (58) and the descent (17,232m, or nearly double the height of Mount Everest) was frighteningly exhilarating. Peter had doubts we’d make it in time.
“We need speed. So when I let it go, let it go,” he said.
“How fast?” I asked.
“Today, you are Franz Klammer.” From the moment we rode the Panoramabahn from Hollersbach above Mittersill, we agreed seven hours to ski to the end of the map 45km away and back. The unknown came from the fact that we were doing it in mid-January, so would lose almost an hour because of the early-season operating schedule. Naturally, the tour can be started from multiple doorstep-accessible lifts and done over several days, from any base station depending on ability and ambition. The trick, should you want to tackle it in one go, is to come with a guide who knows how to jigsaw the lifts and pistes together, or count on a £50-£100 taxi if you run out of steam.
One more factor is the three-minute bus connection between Aschau and Ki-West. While that might leave purists with steamed-up goggles, it is hassle-free and, in my book, welcome. Pause a moment and you can almost hear your knees saying thank you.
12 noon
We had made it across the Gampenkogel (1,459m) to Brixen im Thale and up and over a succession of Austrian crowns, the Zinsberg (1,359m), Hartkaiser (1,526m) and Astberg (1,267m). We didn’t quite have time to race down the Streif, the treacherous World Cup course, nor did we stop at the medieval Salvenkirche, Austria’s highest pilgrim church. But we did experience the magnetic pull of the Wilder Kaiser massif from every angle, the sun’s rays turning them from mottled grey to gold to dusky pink as we turned back towards our Hollersbach start point.
4.30pm
In truth, there are as many ways to tell the story of the KitzSkiWelt Tour as there are routes across it, and ours was ultimately one of fading light, one wrong turn and one short bootpack back up the piste. With time running out, we made it across a blur of valleys, past mountain huts from another age, only to find a crucial last link – Mt Pengelstein towards Jochberg – closing for the day.
For a short time, we had felt like Olympians in the sun, but had fallen short at a distance just shy of 75km (13km from the finish post).
Did it matter? Not a jot. Most importantly, all of this would be open, unchanged and pisted once more for another go tomorrow.