Stubai Valley on 04.12.2021 | ChevChelios

Snow condition

With a little goodwill, you can give 2 stars for the snow conditions. For the forest and mountain pine terrain, however, the current snow conditions are actually still rather borderline. In the somewhat more open forest it's fine, although you should watch out for tree stumps etc. there too. There is still far too little snow for the denser forest and many mountain pine fields are still anything but closed. This means that the choice of routes in the off-piste terrain is currently still very limited. The ground and stones are also showing through at one point or another.

Snow quality

Beautiful powder snow. As today was the first opening day, there were also no old tracks, which meant that the fresh snow lay on a soft layer of old snow on the north side, making for nice sinking depths. Especially in the forest area without much wind influence, but there wasn't much wind influence further up either. You really couldn't complain about the snow quality today.

Above the tree line a 3, below a 2. Sliding snow cracks were visible, and a snow slab crack in southeast-facing terrain (altitude approx. 2200m). As the crack was not very thick, I assume from a distance that it was small-scale drift snow. We were only out and about below the tree line and in the flatter terrain above, where the snow cover made a good impression. We saw a blast crater in the upper part below the Sennjoch lift, but nothing was triggered there.

Overall impression

After a few nice tours, we finally had our first freeride day in the area. With good timing (i.e. first gondola), there were some nice lines to be had in the forest. Not much going on by Schlick standards, but due to the limited terrain at the moment (too little snow for dense forest and mountain pines), the lines were still ripped up relatively quickly. It was no longer so easy to ride in the rutted terrain. But before that there were enough first lines and even a few pillows to pick up, so you can give it a 3rd star.