ISPO

I went to the ISPO in München this year with work. It's pretty much Europe's biggest winter sports exhibition and fills about 10 massive halls over four days.

While it's a fair amount of fun and some of the stands are quite impressive (Volcom's had a huge half pipe skate ramp, plus live punk band every night), there seems to be a serious state of denial within the ski and snowboard industry. Despite snow levels across the Alps being fairly poor for the second year running, ski companies still use images of endless fresh powder runs to sell their ever more technologically advanced equipment.

There was virtually no acknowledgement of the change in climate, which just seems totally short-sighted. In 20 years, it's possible that skiing will only be available above at high altitude and for the super-rich. But does anyone at ISPO seem concerned by this? From what I observed: not really.

New Year's Eve

An afternoon of fun skiing on the Zinkenkögel, 10 minutes drive from our house. There was virtually no one around as it was snowing pretty hard most of the time and I got some beautiful fresh lines in. It's one of the oddities of skiing in Austria: locals aren't that keen on powder or off-piste riding, they love whizzing down groomed slopes under blue skies, which suits me fine. It means it's fairly easy to find untouched deep snow days after the most recent snowfall.


View down the valley towards Salzburg from the Zinkenkögel Sesselbahn. Hallein is in the foreground.


Snowing hard and empty pistes.

Powder

Few shots from Dienten, Pinzgau, on Saturday - premium bluebird powder skiing.

Krampus

Oh yes, it's that time of year again when Austria, that most civilised of European nations, goes nuts and allows people dressed as monsters to go around whipping the locals.

Basically the Krampus are demons that accompany St Nicholas on or around December 6 and scare the living sh*t out of little kids who may have been a bit naughty during the year. These days it's more a bit of fun, but still, they can be a quite menacing and those whips certainly sting.

We saw the best Krampus run in Fuschl am See, which is where these photos were taken. Afterwards we were having a few drinks in the pub and a whole bunch of them came in to dish out another beating.


The grand entrance.


Two Krampuses looking for someone to whip.




Katie and Ingrid with some new friends.

Skiing

The season has come early, which makes a nice change to the dire season we had last year. The mountains have a decent amount of snow already and most resorts opened ahead of schedule.

Here's a couple of pictures taken by Craig Kolesky (www.craigkolesky.com) , a South African photographer. The visibility was pretty bad and these were taken in between the long periods of thick fog. Fantastic day out though..