Austrian Ski Holiday Becomes a Movable Feast : A Cross-Country Skier Makes a Passion of Following Rural Trails to Down-Home Meals

“Aaarrrggghh ... “ was the last sound I heard before Hans, my skiing companion and guide, slid over a lip of drifted powder and disappeared from view.

My first concern at this development was the loss of Hans’ rucksack, which contained a loaf of brown bread, a slab of smoked ham, two blocks of Swiss cheese and a bottle of Gewurztraminer. This was to be our lunch.

The snow, dry and powdery as we departed in the early morning twilight, had become sticky, and Hans had stopped twice to change the wax on his skis.

The pitch of the terrain increased steadily as we climbed toward a ridge beneath the south face of Grossglockner, Austria’s highest mountain, and the midday sun was intense to a degree you find only in the Alpine regions. Hans reached the ridge ahead of me and stood gloating as I trudged up the final few yards. I dropped my head to take a deep breath and when I looked up again he was gone. The ridge was as empty as the blue sky overhead.

I scrambled forward to the ridge top and carefully sidestepped up to the edge. Nothing--only a precipitous drop into a snow bowl surrounded by vast white emptiness.

Then I saw him, at the base of the slope, hundreds of feet below. He looked like an ant in a sugar bowl. I had no choice but to follow, plowing through the heavy powder, descending in wide traverses punctuated by rolling tumbles that stuffed snow into every exposed orifice. By the time I reached the base I was a human snowball.

“Great run, yes? Almost two hundred meter drop. Big surprise for you,” Hans said amiably.

“Where do we stop for lunch?” I asked, shaking the snow out of my ears.

“Just below, there’s a barn they use in summer. No one there now,” he replied, pointing to the half-buried frame.

The snow in front of the barn was trampled flat and several logs were piled against the side to serve as benches. We spread the food out on top of our rucksacks and uncorked the wine. It was cold and effervescent and felt good going down.

We finished the speck , a smoked Alpine ham similar to Italian prosciutto, cheese and most of the bread and sat with our backs against the rough bark of the logs drinking the last of the wine and looking out at distant peaks. It seemed at the time that the best parts of Austria--the food, wine, companionship and endless mountains--had been distilled into one perfect moment.

When I arrived in Vienna in March a balmy breeze was blowing and there was not a snowflake in sight. A few days shy of the spring equinox, it felt like the first day of summer. Though I’m an experienced cross-country skier, I had never tackled the terrain of Austria, a country better known for its downhill slopes.

There are 7,500 miles of cross-country ski trails in Austria. The Austrians spend a good deal of time and money to ensure that they are all safe and well maintained. Trails are clearly marked and color-coded according to difficulty (blue is the easiest, red is moderately difficult and black is most difficult).

Sitting in the Cafe Schopenhauer drinking a krugel of pils with some pals, I shared my no-snow dilemma. Peter, a music composer and avid sportsman, spoke up.

“I know a place,” he said. “It’s on a high plateau about five hours from here. There’s a train in the morning from the south station that will put you there by noon. If there’s snow in Austria, you’ll find it there.”

As the train pulled out of the Sudbahnhof in the early morning darkness, I stood by the window staring out at the sleeping city. Soon the stone facades and empty boulevards of Vienna evaporated, replaced by fields and forests. At dawn the sky cleared and the sun rose between hillocks, thrusting blades of light into the valley.

Outside of Murzzuschlag, mountain scenery began to appear. The train wound through a deep river valley between towering highlands where villages painted ocher and rust huddled around ancient churches. A castle became visible on a distant hillside, shrouded in mist.

As we climbed farther into the mountains the first snow appeared beside the tracks. By the time we reached the town of Radstadt, the landscape was dazzling white in every direction.

Five hours, 200 miles and 35 dollars out of Vienna, I got off the train at Radstadt Station and followed a winding path to the town square. Lined with turn-of-the-century buildings painted pink and ocher and pale blue, the main street has a bank, a cafe, a post office and a shop renting cross-country skis.

Radstadt, located at 2,568 feet, occupies the center of the Upper Enns Valley at the foot of Mt. Rossbrand. Flanked by the Radstaeder Tauern Range to the south and the Dachstein Massif to the north, the valley has 80 miles of cross-country skiing trails, and I set off to cover all of them.

I packed a change of clothes and a poncho into my rucksack and checked my bags at the railway station. After renting skis, boots and poles at the sport shop on the main street, I picked up a map and a few pointers at the tourist office and aimed my tips into a snow-covered meadow.

For the next week I skied trails out of Radstadt to Untertauern, Zauchensee, Flachau, Wagrain and Kleinarl. I slept in guest houses, a resort hotel, a private home and a barn. I ate everything that was put in front of me. This included griesnockerlsuppe and bauernschmaus and kasnock’n and other delicious and unpronounceable foods, most containing some form of meat and potatoes.

There is an often quoted (and seldom observed) Austrian proverb that extols the nutritional virtues of breakfasting like a king, lunching like a commoner and dining like a beggar. While the Austrians wholeheartedly go along with the part about regal breakfasts, they aren’t so keen on the rest of the proverb.

The victuals and potables of the Austrian highlands are custom-made for the culinary needs of the mobile epicure. A visit to the local fleischereien yields cured ham, salami and sausage. The backereien offers a hundred different kinds of bread. A wide variety of cheeses can be had at the dairy shop and a bottle of dry white wine is never hard to find.

One night during my stay in the Austrian Alps, I was invited out for a meal at a farmhouse among the vineyards in the mountains. The owners of this particular farmhouse, a rambling and ramshackle affair, opened their home to strangers three nights a week and cooked a country feast for all comers. There was a modest fee involved that was left on the table in the form of a handful of crumpled banknotes at night’s end.

Everyone sat down at the rough wooden table and the farmer’s son brought out several pitchers of heurige --sweet and mild new wine--and slabs of speck on a wooden cutting board. This ham reportedly is home to thousands of harmless, miniscule insects which can be sighted at very close inspection. They are a sign, one of my hosts informed me, that the meat is good.

A flat bread flavored with cumin seeds was served with a dumpling soup followed by a platter heaped with potatoes and roast pork. Finally there was a dessert of baked fruit pastries dusted in powdered sugar, and countless glasses of schnapps. Austrian folk songs followed until about 2 a.m., when everyone staggered out into the sharp night air and down to an inn at the foot of the mountain.

In Kleinark, I visited Cafe Annamarie, a coffee shop run by Annamarie Proll Moser, six-time winner of the World Cup in skiing. I had lunch at the Gasthof Lurzer, a fine old guesthouse in the village of Untertauern.

However, I spent my most enjoyable evening entertaining a farmer and his wife in their home near Radstadt. I arrived at their doorstep late in the afternoon and asked if they might have a room to let for the night. They invited me in and after sharing a home-cooked supper I was invited to pass the evening in their parlor. For the next two hours I performed feats of pantomime and dictionary-juggling to the apparent delight of my hosts.

After a week on the trail, I turned in my skis, collected my bags and took the train for Lienz, a town in the estuary of the Drau and Isel rivers at the foot of Austria’s highest mountains. Confident that I was sufficiently warmed up and ready for greater challenges than the Enns Valley had to offer, I was on my way to the high mountains of the East Tyrol.

Lienz is a 700-year-old town dominated by mountains--not the pleasant green slopes of Salzburg Province but the jagged and windswept granite faces of the Tyrolian Alps. There I boarded a public bus to to the village of Kals at the base of 13,000-foot Grossglockner.

A wooden house on the outskirts of town had a zimmer (room) sign hanging outside, advertising lodgings available. I knocked on the door and went inside, where the innkeeper’s red-haired daughter showed me to an upstairs room. It was small and unheated, but the windows faced the mountains and the bed was covered by the biggest goose-down quilt I had ever seen.

Some of my most memorable experiences in Austria revolve around gasthauser and the men and women who run them. The atmosphere, especially in the mountain regions, is Spartan and robust. They feature heavy exposed beams, bare wood floors, whitewashed walls and very little heat. The dining rooms usually have a fireplace.

The little wooden guesthouse in Kals was by far my favorite. The innkeeper’s name was Freidrich. He was a big, broad-faced Tyrolian with a perpetual smile. He also had a natural instinct for providing service and a refined sense of the absurd. One morning I showed him on the map the course we planned to cover that day. He laughed.

“I will put the key under the mat because you won’t be back before midnight,” he said.

“I’ll be back for supper at 7 o’clock,” I said.

“That’s impossible,” he replied. “If you make it back by 7, I will eat my lederhosen.”

And so it came to pass, after a grueling day on skis, I returned to the inn just before 7 p.m. Freidrich was not happy but managed to conceal his disappointment behind a mask of bravura.

“So, you are back already. The mountain was too much for you, ya?” he said.

I told him we had made it all the way around the course and showed him on the map exactly where we had gone.

“You win,” he said, “and I eat my lederhosen. But please not today. I just finished supper and I couldn’t swallow another bite.”

Dried flowers adorned the walls and a heavy climbing rope served as a hand railing on the stairs at Freidrich’s guest house. The interior was white plaster and unvarnished wood and the place smelled like the home of my German grandparents: a smell of food and smoke and pine resin. A fire was burning in the fieldstone hearth and Freidrich’s daughter had prepared a rich stew of meat and vegetables served with sweet bread and goat’s cheese.

That night I slept well under the heavy covers and woke to find sunlight streaming in through the windows of my room. It had snowed during the night and Kals was covered in a layer of sparkling white.

Over a breakfast of hot rolls with cheese and peppered ham, I struck up a conversation with a young Austrian staying at the inn and we decided to ski together.

Hans was from Lienz but skied in Kals every winter and knew all of the trails. He used old-fashioned ash-wood skis which he waxed before setting out. We followed groomed trails at first, then set off through new powder. He led the way out of town and over one of the high ridges into a snow bowl. We skied all day and as the afternoon light faded we began our descent through the silver-blue shadows of the giants overhead. With the peak of Grossglockner towering behind me, I stopped and looked down at the cold, sparkling lights of Kals. The moon was rising and the first stars had begun to appear. I was tired, cold, hungry, and the happiest I could ever remember being. Then I pushed off and glided silently into the village below.

GUIDEBOOK

Nordic Skiing, Alpine Climes

Getting there: Delta, TWA, Air Canada, British Airways, KLM, Lufthansa and Scandinavian airlines offer connecting service from LAX to Vienna, Austria’s air hub. A round-trip coach ticket with a 14-day advance-purchase fare is $750. Trains for the Alpine regions leave regularly for the city’s south railway station (Sudbahnhof). A ticket from Vienna to Radstadt is $35; from Radstadt to Lienz about the same. Allow a full day to reach most Alpine destinations. Major car rental companies have offices at the airport, with rental rates and gasoline about double what they are in the U.S.

Skiing: Cross-country equipment is available for rent in all of Austria’s mountain regions. Rates run about $10 a day for skis, boots and poles. The basic technique is easy to learn, and competent instructors abound. Many areas offer special attractions such as night skiing and dog runs along the trails.

Where to stay: In Radstadt, the Hotel Das Weissenhofgut (Weissenhof 6, 5550 Radstadt; from U.S. phones 011-43-6452-7001) features an indoor pool and sauna at $44-$98 a night. Gastof Bruggler (Hohenbeggstrasse 10, 5550 Radstadt; 011-43-6452-232) has rooms with private baths at $28-$31 a night.

In Lienz, the Hotel Traube (Hauptplatz 14, 9900 Lienz; 011-43-4852-64444) offers luxury accommodations at $62 a night. Or try the Gasthof Gribelehof (Schlossberg 10, 9900 Lienz, 011-43-4852-62191) for a quiet location in a historic building at $24-$27 a night.

In Kals, there’s the Hotel Krone (Grossdorf 25, 9981 Kals/Glossglockner, 011-43-4876- 241) with pool and sauna at $18-$27 a night, and the Gasthof Tauernwirt (Burg 11, 9981 Kals; 011-43-4876-226) for $43-$47 a night.

Where to eat: Recommended restaurants include Gasthof Bruggler (Hoheneggstrasse 10) and Hotel Zum Jungen Romer (Romerstrasse 18), both in Radstadt; Gasthof Schlossberghof (Iseltalerstrasse 21), well-known for its hearty Tyrolean dishes and rustic atmosphere, in Lienz; and Landgasthaus Glocknerblick (Arnig 7) and Gasthof Tauernwirt (Burg 11) in Kals.

For more information: Contact the Austrian National Tourist Office, 11601 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 2480, Los Angeles 90025, (310) 477-3332, fax (310) 477-5141.