If you don’t have the right gear, deep powder snow is both a blessing and a curse

In deep powder snow, the snowboard is the ultimate tool, allowing the rider to drift effortlessly downhill using only the minutest movements to change direction. Paradoxically however, in these exact same conditions a snowboard can also be a pointless, maddeningly cumbersome dead weight. On a steep slope, midway through a high-speed turn with only a few centimetres of your edge in contact with the ground, it can sometimes feel as if the rules of gravity have momentarily ceased to apply. As soon as you come to a stop, though, it’s a different story. The metal wing that was allowing you to glide dreamily above the snowpack just seconds ago is now acting like an anchor, sinking you in snow up to your waist. Before you can even get your feet out of the bindings, you’ll need to dig your board out of the hole it’s made for itself. Then, when you’ve finally managed to free your feet, you’ll be left with a large, heavy slab of metal and plastic to haul around. Think wading though knee-deep snow is hard work? Try carrying a few extra kilos and sinking a couple of extra inches with every step.

The first time I experienced really deep snow – by which I mean snow so deep that it’s more-or-less impossible to walk through it without snowshoes – was in British Columbia’s Monashee Mountains in 2008. I was writing a travel story about Mustang Powder, a cat skiing company, and I still vividly remember the first time I jumped out of the snowcat at the top of a run and was instantly buried up to my waist in the snow. I soon learned not to jump out of the cat, and I also learned how to flatten out a firm patch of snow with your board before putting it on. Failure to do this usually resulted in losing your balance, toppling over backwards and getting stuck on your back like a beetle, arms and legs flailing.

I wasn’t in Austria for the really big

snowfall that brought the country to a standstill this January, but I was there in February for the aftermath, staying just up the road from Ramsau am Dachstein, where a few weeks previously an avalanche had swept through the ground floor of the Hotel Pehab-kirchenwirt. Fortunately the slide happened in the middle of the night so nobody was injured, but newspaper reports with pictures of army engineers shovelling snow out of the hotel’s dining room showed how bad things could have been if the avalanche had happened a few hours earlier or later.

One morning, after a day and a night of heavy snow and with fat flakes still swirling down from a dark grey sky, I grabbed a snowboard and some walking poles and set off for the forestry trails above the village of Sankt Martin am Grimming. In retrospect I should have taken a pair of snowshoes, but I had seriously underestimated how deep the snow would be. On the recently-ploughed single-track road, the snow was only a few inches thick; as soon as I turned off onto the forestry trail, however, I found myself sinking up to my knees. Nobody, it seemed, had been walking up here for some time. After a few more minutes of slow going, I was up to my thighs. Cursing the fact that I didn’t have snowshoes (or a split snowboard, which would have enabled me to slide along on top of the snow) I plodded on.

As the trail began to wind its way uphill, I caught glimpses of what I was looking for – narrow ribbons of white between the trees where, in years gone by, I’d had some of my most memorable runs. Usually, though, these hidden glades were a lot easier to access. As I rounded a corner I came across an unexpected barrier: a fir tree lying across the path, having been brought down by the weight of snow in its branches. I threw my board, bag and poles over the top, crawled underneath and carried on. Around the next corner there was another tree down, then another. Five fallen trees later, I finally came to a familiar bend in the trail, but when I got to the spot where my favourite run began, there was no run to be seen – only a 10-metre high pile of avalanche debris. The avalanche had evidently happened some time ago – a thick layer of fresh snow had fallen on top of the rough, angular, blocks of hardpack since they had come tumbling down the hillside – but still, this wasn’t one for today. Close by I knew there was another similar glade, shorter and a little less steep but still a reasonable pay-off for all the calories I’d burned, so I turned around and began wading towards it.

Relieved to discover that there were no obvious obstacles to prevent access to glade number two, I slowly zig-zagged up the right-hand side of it, staying in the trees and clear of the fall-line. Once I’d climbed as high as I could go, I used my board to flatten out a platform, Monashee-style, took a seat and guzzled most of my water. Then I launched myself downhill, enjoying a few seconds of my board doing what it was designed for before it turned back into a pointless, cumbersome dead weight.

I found myself sinking up to my knees. After a few more minutes, I was up to my thighs