Snow of Tomorrow | Mountainsports for Everyone

The project took place in collaboration with a Viennese and a Salzburg secondary school class. It started in autumn 2023 with climate workshops in the schools. Initial difficulties with concentration, which are common at school, quickly gave way to curiosity and anticipation for the days in nature. Just a few weeks later, the Salzburg pupils were able to escape the classroom and spend a day in the trail park. The Viennese pupils also swapped the classroom for the climbing hall for a day, the report on which can be found here.

After the successful climbing, biking and climate workshops in the first half of the school year 23/24, the final event in the project series took place at the beginning of March. The two school classes from Vienna and Salzburg were invited by POW to Gosau in Upper Austria to try out the winter sports like skiing and snowboarding for two days. The two POW volunteers Lena Öller and Martin Svejkovsky accompanied the event and reported on it afterwards.

The POW snowboard team was joined by Laura Meier from the Chill Foundation. Chill is an organisation that gives children and young people with a refugee background or from difficult family situations access to various board sports. Laura emphasises that sport can also have a great mental impact: "Snowboarding has not only taught me a lot in terms of sport, but has also given me a lot for life in general: Not to give up - and to keep trying until you succeed. The ambition that develops in you can be extremely motivating." And sport is an ideal outlet for releasing pent-up energy. The students from Vienna and Salzburg also noticed this: Some initial frustration because a movement didn't work out straight away quickly turned into great fun. After two days of skiing lessons, almost all of the kids actually managed to make beautiful turns down the slope. The snowboarders even jumped over small jumps - and also mastered this challenge with flying colours!

Giving children and young people a connection to winter sports

It is often said that Austria is THE winter sports nation. However, it is also a fact that fewer and fewer children and young people in Austria are learning how to ski. Why this is the case, how to get children and young people interested in winter sports and what role the climate crisis plays in this context were the topics of a panel discussion that took place as part of the project on Friday evening at Gasthof Gosauschmied. Alongside Christina Stahl from POW and Laura Meier from Chill, Peter Grögler (board member of Bergbahnen Dachstein-Salzkammergut), climate scientist Andreas Gobiet (Geosphere Austria) and Christian Schirlbauer (managing director of the Dachstein Salzkammergut tourism association) took part in the discussion.

The event began with a video by POW athlete Manuela Mandl from our Tell Your Story campaign. In it, she says that many young people have simply lost touch with winter sports as they are becoming increasingly difficult to access - whether due to rising prices, the climate-related reduction of winter sports destinations to the west of Austria or simply the image of sport in general. In order to restore this connection through projects such as Mountainsports for Everyone, clubs such as POW or Chill are dependent on support, Christina Stahl concluded.  

Peter Grögler pointed out that there are still many individual ski lifts in Upper Austria in locations close to the valley. "The lift tickets there are cheap and the mayors are highly motivated to maintain these facilities. So a lot is already being done to keep children and young people interested in winter sports." Andreas Gobiet then referred to current climate science forecasts, which suggest that winter operations in small ski resorts close to the valley are not sustainable. "In future, it will also be too warm for artificial snowmaking at lower altitudes, which was emphasised several times during the discussion," he stated. In the end, the panellists more or less agreed that global warming represents a major challenge for the Salzkammergut tourism region - and Christian Schirlbauer offered POW future support from the Dachstein Salzkammergut Tourism Association.