(Kingston, Ontario, Canada)

Context is everything in travel. In 2013, I had such a great week of skiing in Val Gardena that the following 4 days of skiing in Stuben, Austria, could never measure up. And by the end of a stretch where I was skiing for 10 out of 11 days, I think that some fatigue set in and minor annoyances were easily exaggerated.

I was recently browsing through my photo archives and found some pictures from my 5-day stay in Stuben. A lot of impressions came flooding back.  I realized that Stuben really was a beautiful village.   I also remembered that the weather really didn’t cooperate…we didn’t see too much sun when we were on the slopes, even though it was technically already springtime.  In fact, I think we only had one partial day of sunny skies.

Strangely enough, the strongest lingering impression was about cigarettes. The owner of our B&B smoked incessantly. The nearest pub and restaurant also seemed to follow a different set of rules from the rest of the Alps.  Restaurants and hotels have been smoke-free in Canada for so long that these smoky places literally left a really bad taste.

Many years have passed, and I know that the B&B is now under new management.  I suspect the pub is no longer a smoking “outlier” either. Maybe it’s time for a fresh assessment of skiing in Stuben?

Stuben has a lot going for it. It’s a tiny, remote village at “the end of the road”, but is still linked to the legendary St. Anton ski area. The pistes are long and often challenging. And the lift pass also gets you on the slopes at Lech, Zurs, St. Christoph, and Sonnenkopf. Since our visit, the slopes at nearby Warth and Schroecken have been linked as well.

Even though there was a blizzard and there were only about 12 people skiing in the entire Sonnenkopf area, we still had a lot of fun on our day there. Sure, we rarely saw where we were going but, with slightly better visibility, it could have moved from “fun” to “epic”.

I’ve had some great travel experiences in Austria, such as my whirlwind 2014 visit to Vienna. It may be time to move on from the bad weather (and cigarettes) of 2013 and give Austrian skiing another shot!