Skiing Austria - Timely Snow

It would be disappointing to travel all the way to Austria on a ski-snowboard trip and find only brown ground, but a storm brought snow last weekend.

Austrian skiers and snowboarders have been singing the no-snow blues. Backcountry skiers, telemarkers and snowshoers, too, for that matter.

Until last Saturday, that is.

Colleagues and I arrived in Salzburg, Austria, a week ago filled with trepidation. European skiing and snowboarding, we'd heard, had been hit with a snow drought as bad as the one we'd just left in the northeast U.S.

Ski races, snowboard competitions and freestyle events, the news said, were being cancelled all over Europe.

On Day One of our weeklong tour of Salzburgerland, it looked as if our worst fears had come true.

We cancelled plans to ski at low-elevation Lofer, and went higher into the hills. The surfaces were all manmade hardpack. Skiing off-piste was out of the question.

But on Day Three something wonderful happened.

It snowed.

It snowed so hard that we had to cancel our ski day in favor of exploring Salzburg's historic district and shopping ops.

Come Days Four, Five and Six, those hardpack surfaces had morphed into something smooth and buttery. We even ferreted out patches of powder on the final day.

Delightful.

It's still a down year for snowfall in Europe. But, it looks as if Ma Nature has sent some help. At least here in Salzburgerland. Hopefully, more is on the way—because that wide-open, off-piste, ski-anywhere-you-want experience is what we come here for.