Eight long years, that’s how long it has been since my last snowboarding trip. Eight years ago I lived in Amsterdam and flew down to Switzerland for a long weekend for some snowboarding fun. I lived in Zurich the year before, so knew the area quite well. On one of the morning runs down the hill I had a pretty bad fall and injured my left leg. I kept going for the rest of the day which turned out not to be smart and ended in the emergency room. Fast forward a couple more years, to about 2008, and I slipped in front of the house on ice and broke the same leg/ankle in three different places. Needless to say, it took quite some time to heal and some more time before I could put real pressure on my ankle again and do things such as cycling or running.

Fast forward to the beginning of 2015 and I was itching to go snowboarding again. There’s only a limited amount of snowboarding movies and videos one can watch laying on the couch before you feel the urge to book a plane ticket and head to the mountains. I picked up skateboarding/longboarding two summers ago, but even that wasn’t enough.

I’ve been to ski resorts in Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia and France in the past, but never in the USA or Canada. I called a couple of friends of mine begging to go on a snowboarding trip to Colorado, Canada or some other ski resort here in the USA/Canada, but all of them either had a no plans to go or had already gone in December. Going by yourself quite honestly sucks, so I was disappointed that I may not go again this season. Luckily my mom called me and told me that she had a trip planned to Hochsoelden in Austria. It didn’t take a lot to convince her and after a couple of calls we found a place for me to stay, and a couple of clicks and I had a plane ticket booked.

Hochsoelden is located in the Oetztal Alps, roughly 2090 meters above sea level. It’s about 3 hours by car from Munich airport, which I flew into directly from New York. The best part, Hochsoelden is located right in the ski resort and you have access to about 33 lifts/gondolas, 150km of ski slopes, a glacier, and peaks as high as 3,340 meters. Luckily the weather was gorgeous as well throughout the week and the snow conditions were awesome. There was enough snow to do one of the longest runs, 15km, from the peak all the way down to the valley (Soelden).

Even before my trip started I was excited about taking photos in Austria of the Alps. I decided to take my Hasselblad with me and a couple rolls of Kodak Portra 400 and Fuji Pro 400H. The majority of the photos below are Kodak Portra 400. But enough of the talk, below are the photos I took on the trip. All were scanned/developed by Richard PhotoLab in California. Enjoy!

Technology has a evolved quite a bit, even on the ski slopes. You can actually go online after your ski trip, type in your ski-pass number and get a recap of your entire trip.