A POWDER DREAM IN THE WILDER KAISER

The snow, so soft and deep – too soft and deep

Early in the afternoon, the weather outside the hut finally starts to calm down and the thick clouds part to give us a view of the “Schönwetterfensterl”. It lies before us, invitingly untouched and yet gloomy and forbidding, and we decide to at least give it a try and check out the conditions on site. A snow profile dug into safe terrain gives us faith in the snowpack, we’ll have to move further up before we can judge the shifted snow in the gully. We know the terrain, we make good progress on our climbing skins and then shortly afterwards, when the slope gets steeper, we attach our skis to our backpacks. But then we hardly make any progress at all: the snow is so soft and deep that we struggle to put one foot in front of the other. We spend a good half hour battling to the top, but as the weather gets worse and the spindrift gets stronger, we realize that we don’t stand a chance. Maybe tomorrow...
 

His majesty is good natured today

And in fact: after a relaxing evening in the hut and a restful night, the next morning greets us with the good weather we were promised and a spectacular sunrise. Our tracks from the day before can scarcely be seen and, conscious of the wind and the new snow from the night before, our senses are alert. But the Kaiser is good to us today: The trudge up to the top is once again incredibly strenuous, but the snow is mostly unbonded and so nothing is standing in the way of our descent of the gully in perfect conditions. We genuinely cannot remember seeing this much snow here in the last few years. The upper part in particular – otherwise often a well-skied, hard and narrow gully – appears as a broad couloir and looks as if it’s inviting us to really tear it up.