Bettina Larl

"All Terain. All the Time" is the slogan of the Line Pandora 95, a ski designed for women with a center width of 95 mm and a freeride shape that is supposed to work anywhere and everywhere. We have put this claim by the ski makers from the USA to the test and naturally don't want to withhold the results.

In the next part of the Anno Dazumal series, Sepp Zangenfeind enthuses about strenuous tours, rewarding views and fast descents in the Kitzbühel Alps in an article from 1916.

Wildspitze and Weißseespitze can now be climbed as short day tours from the nearby glacier ski areas. In 2017, these peaks can be reached by an ascent of significantly less than 1000 vertical meters, as you can read here in the PowderGuide freeride tours Weißseespitze and Wildspitze. 100 years ago, the highest peak in Tyrol and its western neighbor were still extensive "snowshoe hikes", which Franz Tursky reports on in the 6th part of the Anno dazumal series.

In the fifth part of Anno dazumal from 1916, Franz Tursky reports in two parts about past snowshoe trips in the Ötztal Alps. The article was printed in 1916 in Fraktur font and caused some problems for the Alpenwort project, as the Optical Characzer Recognition (OCR) caused some "fails" during digitization. So if you find errors in the text - you can be happy to be better than the software ;) In any case, we hope you enjoy the well-formulated stories about today's "high tour classics"!

The fourth article in the Anno dazumal series also takes us back to shortly after 1900. In the second part of their article "Snowshoe trips in the Hohe Tauern" from 1913, Hans Skofizh and Franz Tursky talk about "tours" of the Große Wiebachhorn, the Johannisberg, the Breitkopf and the Großvenediger. Again, some of these descents may have been first ascents in this region.

The third article in the Anno dazumal series takes us to the Hohe Tauern at the beginning of the 20th century. Hans Skofizh and Franz Tursky report on tours to the Schareck, Hohe Riffl and Granatspitze in the article "Snowshoeing in the Hohe Tauern" from 1913. These descents were probably some of the first ski descents in the Hohe Tauern.

The second article in the Anno dazumal series was also written by Henry Hoek. In the first part of Ten Winters with Skis in the Mountains from 1910, Hoek tells us more about his first attempts "with the narrow boards that give us such a healthy feeling of happiness" in the Black Forest and why they were "anything but encouraging and enjoyable".

A trip report from 1904 marks the start of a new series on PowderGuide: this season, the Austrian Alpine Club and the "Alpenwort" project at the University of Innsbruck are making some selected historical texts available to PowderGuide readers. The "Skifahrt auf das Blindenhorn" by Henry Hoek comes from the Alpine Club Yearbook of 1904. Henry Hoek is considered a ski pioneer and is one of the most influential alpine writers of his time. He also published the world's first ski guide in 1908: Skifahrten im Südlichen Schwarzwald (Skiing in the Southern Black Forest).