AUSTRIA'S WILD SIDE
PHOTO Wisthaler Harald
Heiligenblut is Austria’s Chamonix, famed as a mountaineering and freeride mecca in the heart of the Hohe Tauern National Park. It‘s a small resort with big off-piste access and serious wilderness steeps, says Louise Hall
Blimey, it’s been scoured!” exclaims Simon, a lawyer in our group, brightly hiding his dismay as we gaze out of the frost-covered bubble window at the windblown wasteland below. We are headed up to the Scharek top station, on the first lift of our 'Heiligenblut Day Tours' week with the Ski Club.
“I’m not going to lie, it was brutal up here yesterday, with winds gusting 80km,” says Susie, our Ski Club rep,
a client herself last week. “I gave up and went back to the hotel for a swim and steam to warm up. I don’t remember the last time I did that.” Simon and I look at each other and wince as the bubble grinds to a halt. Even the clouds look to hang limply in the dishwater sky. It’s not exactly a brochure first day.
At the top station, a poster advertising a freeride competition flaps forlornly, ripped. “It was meant to take place yesterday. Blown off – second year in a row,” sighs Matthias, our ski guide. It’s frustrating. We’re here on account of the record snowfall across the Alps.
There is an irony to arriving on an off-piste week to find the best powder in recent years rendered windblown. But, as perfect irony would have it, we needn’t have worried. For, the following day, the snow arrives.
THE HOHE TAUERN ‘BIG FIVE’
It swiftly becomes ‘the week that keeps on giving’. In the end, we clock-up 33,000m vertical. Not bad for a small resort with no mechanical bird in sight. The only birds we see are golden eagles and bearded vultures (a Persian symbol of luck). Keeping your eyes peeled for the Hohe Tauern ‘Big Five’ – the golden eagle, the bearded vulture, ibex, marmot and chamois – is part of the ‘Heiligenblut experience’ we discover… once this lift is moving again.
Right now though, it’s fair to say, moods are not high. The words “robbed” and “anti-climax” are muttered as we kick into our powder skis. We’re the only ones up here, being buffeted by a wind so strong and steady that it blows a long trail of airborne snow that obliterates the sun. Nobody is out to play today.
But this is where good mountain guides show their worth. And with Matthias Lackner (34, a guide of 10 years, who was born in Klagenfurt, the region’s capital, and grew up in Heiligenblut), and Georg Schiechl (54, a guide here of 29 years and owner of the local La Sportiva sports shop), we have seriously lucked in. They couldn’t know the mountains better and their grasp of English is excellent. Divided into two groups for the week, we have Matthias as our guide. A beautiful, fast skier, he has us in stitches daily with his quirky humour.
“There is no such thing as good or bad conditions, just good or bad skiers,” he says, teasing when I beg to know how he masters the ‘shark fins’ so effortlessly. “Close your legs, create one surface and float over,” he says, winking. Skiing, he reminds us, is all about mindset, and this is an ideal opportunity, as ‘expert skiers’, to nail the windblown-off-piste-and-all-conditions technique.
The idea is to move the lower part of your body, not the upper part. As one of our team puts it: “The principal is great, the implementation is another matter.”
After a surprisingly good morning’s freeriding, speed carving the corduroy pistes, tree skiing (better viz) and riding gentle powder bowls around the central Scharek freeride zone, we stop for lunch at the Schistadl restaurant, known locally as the ‘Poison Hut’.
Hans Fleissner-Rieger, the rugged blond local owner, welcomes us like old friends, and serves lashings of steaming homemade Knoblauchsuppe (garlic soup), Karpfensuppe (meat-filled Tortellini soup) and apple strudel, washed down with shots of their famed family ‘poison brew’, a digestif made from local tree roots. Hearty, simple and good value (€10-15 each), lunches here are ultra-affordable.
Steeps and deeps against bright blue skies… what could be better?
“Some mornings we ski in low light, but mostly we ski steeps and deeps against bright blue skies, eyes drawn ever-upwards towards the sparkling spire of Grossglockner (3798m) – the ‘mighty bell-ringer’ – Austria’s tallest mountain”
WEATHER GODS AND POWDER
Being in the epicentre of the Alps, Heiligenblut is influenced from weather fronts from the Mediterranean, the Adriatic and the Gulf of Genoa, bringing snow from all sides. “That’s the good thing – we get lots of powder,” explains Matthias at lunch. “We just need to be put on the map; we haven’t much marketed ourselves… yet. We were excited about the freeride competition, it would have been good for us. We had the snow; we were unlucky. High winds like this are unusual. Very.”
That afternoon, with low light, and snow forecast, we play around the ‘marmot mounds’ (man-made mounds built to slow an avalanche, they look like giant animal homes). “We had a fatal avalanche here in 1951,” says Matthias, explaining that his father was young then. “It was a Sunday so he was at Sunday school, and safe, but had it been any other day he would have been tending the sheep and likely swept away. There were many fatalities. As a result, the village invested heavily.”
Despite low light we cover good distance skiing through to the last lifts, down through more spring snow pastures back to the hotel. These long steeps and deeps are glorious.
We are staying at the historic four-star Nationalpark Lodge Grossglockner, a one-minute stroll from the central lift. Run by the Pichler family, the vibe is more avalanche-pack than dinner jacket. The rooms are spacious, the newly renovated spa is too, but it’s the food, staff and valley views that are standout.
The next morning the snow arrives. Today, at the mid station we turn right, taking the rainbow-coloured ‘ghost train’, as the guides call it, for an aptly spooky front-row-ride right through the dark mountain heart to the Fleisselm freeride area, with Matthias blacking the light with his bag and ‘wooing’ like a ghost.
Heiligenblut – which has 12 lifts accessing 55km of pistes – is divided into six freeride zones covering 1500 hectares; the Fleisselm has steep alpine terrain on the upper part, with gentle, wide powder fields in the lower part. We take the drag to the top of the resort, ride the undulating powder fields down, pop out in the woods, and then loop and repeat, with differing routes.
And so we settle into the rhythm of the week. We may have signed up to a ski touring trip, but we don’t put skins on all week: our group wants to freeride. (The other group wants the fitness so chooses to skin, even when there is easy lift-accessed powder to be had.)
Some mornings we ski in low light, but mostly we ski steeps and deeps against bright blue skies, eyes drawn ever-upwards towards the sparkling spire of Grossglockner (3798m) – the ‘mighty bell-ringer’ – Austria’s tallest mountain.
Later in the week, Matthias picks us up in his car to take us ice-climbing. He comes stocked with ropes, harnesses and, of course, the local ‘poison brew’, to warm us as the light starts to fade – along with the feeling in our toes. It’s freezing climbing a wall of ice but it’s beautiful; the sky lit with stars. It’s satisfying to conquer our fear and learn to climb, like spiders in spikes, trusting the sharp tip of the metal grasping the ice.
Back at the hotel, after a soak in the spa, we reconvene in the hotel bar for the evening’s briefing. It is then, as Frank, the barman, tops up our glasses and places another log on the crackling open-hearth, that we learn the biggest nugget of the trip, so far. This is the exact spot that Austria’s first ‘early Alpine’ mountaineering clients met with their guides to climb the Grossglockner, over a century ago. In essence, this is the very site that Austria’s winter tourism industry was born – now worth over one billion euros annually.
It isn’t every day that one gets to ski in the wildly romantic heart of the Hohe Tauern National Park, return to a luxury spa lodge hotel, with four-course dinners, and take home that fact. Not half bad for the best Austrian ski resort you’d probably never heard of.
RIGHT HAND PHOTO Franz Gerdl
FACTFILE
Freshtracks is running two Heiligenblut Day Tour trips this winter, from 12 January and 19 January 2020. Prices start from £1,550, including seven nights at the Hotel National Park Lodge, half board, return flights, coach transfers and six days with mountain guides.
With thanks to Georg Schiechl and Sportladen Heiligenblut
5 REASONS WHY HEILIGENBLUT SHOULD BE ON YOUR BUCKET LIST
WILD SNOW-SURE SKIING
Marketed as the top of Austria, this is high-Alpine, snow-sure skiing, with the top lift reaching 2,902m.
THE GROSSGLOCKNER
First climbed by the Gurk prince-archbishop Count Franz Xaver of Salm in 1799/1800, it put Heiligenblut on the map as the birthplace of early high Alpinism, a magnet for serious climbers. Ogle at it from the Franz-Josef-Hohe observation point (2,505m).
ST. VINCENT CHURCH
Slap bang next door to your hotel, pop into this famed 550-year-old church to see the relic, allegedly a phial of Christ’s blood brought to the village 1,000 years ago that gives Heiligenblut its name, Holy Blood.
THE GOLDEN VALLEY
Before winter sports tourism, Heiligenblut was Austria’s Gold Rush centre for centuries, from 1476-1874, with 361 pits and 1,500 miners. Word has it there are 120 tons still in this Golden Valley. Visit the shop next to the hotel to take home some Heiligenblut keepsake: Fool’s Gold.
HOHE TAUERN NATIONAL PARK
Made Central Europe’s biggest national park (1833km2) in 1971, it is UNESCO-protected and covers three provinces – Carinthia, Salzburg and the Tyrol. Known as Austria's 'Noah's Ark', it has the world’s fifth highest waterfall and is home to the local ‘Big Five’.