Westendorf is part of the SkiWelt group, but its terrain is on the south side of the valley from Brixen. Thus its topography is more like Kirchberg and Kitzbuhel just a bit farther east. Peaks are also in 6,000 foot range so the terrain opens up a bit more than most of SkiWelt. We had noticed a temperature inversion since we arrived in Brixen/Kitzbuhel, but today clouds/haze were invading the low lying valleys.
Our first run was the west facing black piste 210 which had softened Monday but was now quite firm. Viewed a couple hours later riding the 212 gondola:
I asked if this was like Whiteface and Liz said definitely.
We rode the 111 gondola to ski sunnier aspects. View south from Talkaser:
We worked our way over to ski the long 120 piste fom Gampenkogel east down into the Aschau valley at KiWest.
Base of KiWest with Kirchberg terrain (but no lift) on the other side:
It’s about 2km by bus to Kischberg’s Pengelstein gondola, and yes you can buy a combined lift ticket.
Back up the KiWest gondola we skied pistes and 117 to 111,where we stopped at the 11er Alm for a quick strudel with vanilla sauce.
We then rode the 112 gondola to the top of Westendorf and skied the long north facing 11 piste down to Brixen.
At Brixen you cross under a road and take a rope tow to the gondola stations.
It was now 1PM so we took the same Brixen gondola into the main part of SkiWelt as at the start of Sunday’s skiing. We had skied to the east on Sunday and left the western quarter of SkiWelt for this afternoon.
We first skied down to Soll, which was well within the inversion layer.
Soll must have history of witches, as many signs reflected that theme.
We eventually got up to the top of Hohe Salve. Despite SkiWelt’s mostly short terrain pods, its highest and lowest points are in the west, so we skied the continuous 4,000 vertical down to Hopfgarten.
Back up Hohe Salve, we used the 25, 7 and 6 lifts to get to the same 1c run back to our hotel in Brixen. With the inversion that run was a bit firmer than on Sunday. We skied 14,600 vertical in Westendorf and 17,600 in SkiWelt. We skied 85,200 in the 3 days in this region. I didn’t quite realize until we got to Saalbach that I would be resetting some vertical records on this trip.
Most of these Austrian towns have picturesque churches. Here is Brixen’s as we leave for the 1.5 hour dive to Saalbach.
