Sunday, February 22, 2009

Montafon (Part 1)


I have to confess that when I first heard that I was going to Montafon, I had to ask where it was! It's not a resort that is too high on the radar of British tour ops, but I soon discovered that it is a valley in the far West of Austria, not too far from St Anton and Ischgl.

We stayed in a medieval town called Feldkirch, which is right on the border with Lichtenstein and around a 30 min drive from the main resort village of Schruns. My previous experience of skiing at Feb half term is that you usually queue for about 30-45 mins to get on the gondolas up from resort unless you time it right and beat the ski schools. Schruns was a revelation - our group were the lift queue!

The ski area isn't the biggest, but the convenience of having a ski hire shop up the mountain (where we could leave skis and boots each night) combined with no lift queues really does make it a winner. Of course the metres of fresh powder snow always help make a resort look good.


Due to the presence of a very posh (private) sports clinic in Schruns, there is a rescue helicopter(pictured above) that spends all of its time based here. The "NHS" one will fly in for people who have no insurance or ask to go to the public hospital. Fortunately we didn't need to make use of either, and the worst we suffered was a ski that was lost due to the waist deep powder.

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