Chin held to the sky - snowshoeing in Postalm

For woowoo no.2 of the year, we’re back in Austria. 

This time, Salzburg. A city that has been on the list for some time, and a good ‘basecamp’ to go and do some cool things in the surrounding area. 

Close by we have Konigsee, a beautiful mountain lake, the chance to do some skiing, hiking, and try out snowshoeing for the first time. 

Our first snowshoe experience. 

It's an early start, we’ve arranged to meet our snowshoe guide at the highest car park of the ski resort for 9am.

The weather had been clear so far, no extra snow - which meant the drive should be easy, and the mountains would still have good conditions for our walk. 

As we get closer to the resort, the road starts to zig zag though, and we reach a toll gate for a mountain pass… That means we’re going up up up. 

At this point, we cut back to that moment in the car rental, where the guy asks us if we’ll need snow chains. 

“No”, we say. “Of course not, we won’t be doing any of that kind of driving”.. Right?

As we continue to zigzag our way up the mountain, it starts to snow. And the little patches of snow on the side of the road turn into walls of snow that you can’t see over anymore.

But we don’t need snow chains, right?

We drive slowly, a few locals pass us. They also don’t have snow chains - we should be fine, so we keep going slowly up the road.

The conditions don’t get much worse, and we make it to our meeting point.

There’s a man standing outside his van, the boot is open revealing a whole stack of snowshoe gear and poles. Running around next to him, a big, snow white, fluffy dog waiting for the adventure. That’s Christian, our snowshoe guide, and Snowy, his fluffy companion. 

Altogether, we were 8 people taking part in the tour: around a 3 hour walk off-piste at Postalm. 

We were a mix of newbies, and some more experienced snowshoers. 

The view from the car park was already amazing. Postalm is a mountain region just over an hour away from Salzburg.

The highest peak is 1300m, but whichever direction you looked in, there were mountains  climbing higher than those next to them for the top spot. 

We hadn’t even started walking.. We didn’t even have our snowshoes on yet - and already I knew it was a woowoo day. 

With Snowy leading the way, we set off on the tour. Taking it very easy at first, and learning the basics from our guide. He was teaching us the proper technique for walking in snowshoes, watching our form and helping us improve. 

As we got a bit more comfortable, the pace picked up, and so came the first challenge. It was a pretty steep decline in front of us. 

Christian was calm, and confident - he simply explained how to position your feet on the way down that would make it ‘easy’. 

We did it - and it wasn’t too bad at all - but that ‘pretty steep’ decline we just conquered, would actually be a small bump compared to what was coming up. 

We were chatting, smiling, and enjoying the quiet moments taking it all in. 

Snowy was loving the company, running from the front of the group to the back, and to the front again to maximise the attention on him.

I guess Christian saw that we were having too much fun, and wanted to have some of his own. 

That led us to the real challenge for the day. 

We started off down another steep descent, towards a cross-country skiing path. 

We took a break at the path, next to an almost vertical wall of snow.

As we set off after the break, Christian wasn’t following the nicely made path - instead he was heading straight for the wall.

He turned to look at our reactions with a huge smile on his face “Yeah, that’s where we’re going now” 

Well ok, this was going to be fun. 

He encouraged us to race to the top, and even if we started off fast, at one point everyone was out of breath and focussing on scaling this wall without falling down.

The view at the top was well worth it - with rays of sunshine breaking through the clouds and illuminating the bare rock faces around us. I was quite surprised at what we just achieved, it wasn’t easy, but it was nowhere near as difficult as it looked.

Snowshoes are pretty cool.

But what goes up, must come down. 

Now we had the real descent. What we considered steep before, was actually just a small hill. 

And again, Christian just perches at the top, with the biggest grin on his face. He transitions from guiding us, to laughing at our attempt to go down. 

After conquering these 2 challenges, Christian is confident in the group, and adjusts the route to a more scenic version.

I thought we had been off-piste already, but now we were really going into the thick of it. 

Steep descents between the trees. 

There was no path anymore, except the one we made.

It got pretty sketchy at one point, as we were losing grip and sliding around on the slippery ground. 

We were almost out of the woods and on to what looked like a path again, but at the last corner almost everyone slipped over on icy tree roots.

Christian and Snowy enjoyed that. 

The sun was shining and it turned into a beautiful, calm walk on the mountain again. 

Everyone went to their own happy place.

There was a moment, or expression that i’ll never forget, and hope to replicate with these future woowoos. 

A few minutes of walking in silence, just being totally happy with where we were.

I look ahead to Christian, with a very happy, calm grin on his face. His chin was held so high. He was in his element - doing what he loved, and so happy to share it with us. 

This is what it’s all about. That’s his woowoo. 

The peaceful moment didn’t last for long. Up ahead there is a river and waterfall crossing our path. 

Normal procedure here, Christian walks across like it’s nothing, setting up with his camera on the other side to capture our attempts - which all went pretty smoothly thankfully. 

The waterfall was the last major obstacle. It was just another 30 minutes or so and we’d be back at the carpark where we started a few hours before. 

Some of us were hungry and tired at this point, I kind of wished that it wouldn’t end.

I didn’t even try to convince the rest to extend the tour - knowing that a warm lunch and a sit down was the alternative. (And to be fair, I was also not disappointed in that option - I would try to convince the others to ski in the afternoon, when they got some energy back!)

Information on snowshoeing in Postalm:

• around 1 hour drive from Salzburg (skiing and snowshoe available)

• Our guide was booked through Salzburg adventures, and we highly recommend Christian and Snowy!