24 hours of heavy snowfall

10th March 2017, by Dave Watts

Little Hochoetz has much easier and friendlier skiing than Kuhtai

It started snowing here in Kuhtai around 6pm on Wednesday evening and carried on for 24 hours.

That made Thursday a tough day for ski testing with poor visibility (and few trees to help) and wet snow on the lower slopes. More about that in my next blog on all mountain skis for experts and on-piste skis designed for intermediates. Watch this space.

On Friday it was a day off from testing and sunny. I decided to take the bus from Kuhtai to the nearby resort of Hochoetz, covered by the Kuhtai lift pass.

The skiing there is much easier than Kuhtai (which is mainly seriously steep red runs). It is also much lower (from 1540m to 2270m, compared with Kuhtai’s 2020m to 2520m) and the pistes are treelined.

There was fabulous powder on the upper pistes that was a delight to ski (off-piste was out of bounds for me because of high avalanche danger) and I had half a dozen excellent runs. But yesterday’s snow fell as rain below around 1900m, so the lower part of the mountain was hardpacked and not much fun.

I headed back to Kuhtai for the afternoon and found most of the slopes had good snow but moguls had built up on them – not my idea of fun.

It’s back to the UK tomorrow on an early Inghams charter flight which will mean leaving the hotel at 4.30am.

I and the rest of the Telegraph testing team have been staying in Inghams’ chalet-hotel Elisabeth in the centre of Kühtai and right next to the ski school, nursery slope and three chair lifts to the main slopes. The accommodation was spacious and excellent – see the link above for more details.

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