Balkan

Watch out! The season is already in full swing and before you know it, everything will be slush again! Just don't let the social media feeds tell you that you've already missed so much and stay calm and stoked! It's not too late yet! Let's go!

It's the end of February and I'm sitting in the south of Germany. When I look out of the window, all I see is green. At least the sun is shining. Unfortunately, when I look at the World Wide Web, I don't see any forecasts that could stir my emotions. In my home mountains, the High Tatras (Poland), the pictures on social media only show beautiful slopes reflecting in the sun, but hardly any snow, which is also frozen hard.

Of course, the Alps are our favorite. But hold on! Other regions of Central Europe also have beautiful mountains, with mostly relaxing and sometimes exciting terrain and descents. Regional ski touring in the nearest low mountain range was the new discovery and rediscovery par excellence at the height of the pandemic: Badisch Columbia 2021! We stay at home and head east, north, west and south. There's snow everywhere and hopefully freedom to travel again soon.

Marco Milanese is an alpine mountain guide, a modern adventurer and certainly a local legend in Friuli-Venezia-Giulia. The variety of his mountain activities is astonishing, based upon alpine climbing, reaching towards highlining and base jumping, but also incorporating skitouring, freeriding and speedflying. In this interview we try to find out about Marco and how he manages such a variety of mountain activities, how he deals with risk and what he was doing last winter.

Picture Organic Clothing has supported some very successful film projects in recent years. "Shelter", "Zabardast" and "In Gora" are now available online and are perfect for an extended movie night at home.

Western weather will bring repeated disturbances over the next few days with significantly milder temperatures than recently. By Friday, considerable amounts of fresh snow in the west, albeit with a very high snow line.

While it's just a bit of a flurry in the northern Alps these days, the situation far to the south-east is more exciting, albeit very uncertain. Next week, a phase of extremely wintry temperatures is on the horizon across a large area.

The WeatherBlog is back again at the end of the season and is looking at the ice saints to mark the occasion.

The most interesting weather phenomenon in the Alps at the moment is the temperature. Cold feet and light frostbite among skiers are becoming luxury problems in the wake of the current cold spell.

Alterna Films from Canada bring a solid snowboard flick to the market with "Hello World", the chapters about Bosnia Herzegovina and Turkey really stand out. Unfortunately, there is mainly snowboarding to be seen in the cities, including tricks on bombed-out facades in the Balkans.

Dionysus, god of wine, sensual pleasures and fertility, symbol of immortality - Spartacus, the courageous leader of a slave revolt - Thracian figures from Greek mythology and from the Asterix books of my childhood haunt my dreams.... "Nastráwe" – "Cheers" - did we have too much of the excellent wine from Melnik last night, or did the young freeride lady Maya enchant us with her red and white lucky ribbons for the March holiday?