A old friend of mine, Rainer Nootz, started his own ski company in Konstanz last year. Together with Werner Früh - a snowboard veteran and designer of various boards including the Jester series - he founded Powder Equipment. Powder Equipment specialises on Freeride and Big-Mountain skis and boards - hand made in Germany, with only the finest and laest materials.

Currently they have two product lines: Type A and Type B. Both series offer skies and snowboard - made for similar usage!

Type A is a ultralight series for Freeriding and Backcountry. The board is a Race-Snowboard.

Type B is a unique Big-Mountain ski and a Longboard. The board is available as a 3 piece Touringboard as well - very technical piece!

I am looking forward meeting Rainer and his skies the next weeks - and check them out in the mountains. Check back for
my reviews, once we have enough snow to test these guys.

For further details and shopping check out: www.powderequipment.de

Wow - last weekend I went for my first early season tour to the Spitzingsee. It’s a small, but nice Resort and only one hour driving from Munich. An guess what - I found tons of freshest and nicest powder for skiing. So, I chose to hike up to the Rauhkopf, thats approx. 650m in vertical drop (from Spitzingsee-level up to the Rauhkopf). It took me 1,5h to hike up. As this side of the mountain was still closed (and is not going to be opened until December) it is all freeride skiing terrain right now! That means, I had awesome conditions for November and a great ride down. Try to check it out the next days - there is warmer weather to come, and there are tons of nice spots without lines yet…

Enjoy these pix - and sorry for the quality, they were taken with my Nokia-Cam:

Okay, after a long time I finally have to retire my old friends: It is time for some new skiing boots, or to be more precise, time for some new freeride boots! But which ones? So far, I used two pairs, that is a Scarpa Denali XT for longer hiking and my good old Salomon Equipe 9.0 for shorter hikes an freeride session. But to be honest, I’d rather prefer having one pair, that combines both worlds of skiing.

So I looked around and found some contestants: Scarpa Tornado Thermo and two Garmonts, the Garmont Endorphin G-Fit and the Garmont Shaman. The first two a hybrids between randonee/hiking and freeride boots, the Shaman seems to be a pure race/ downhill/ freeride boots: no release or walk mechanism, but exchangeable soles (whoever that needs).

Because it is difficult to test boots in real conditions, I am looking forward to your feedback. Do you have any experience, then please comment or use this nice little widget: Qual der Wahl (provided by the German www.edelight.de social commerce platform). Thanx!

The Chilean Andes house quite some interesting and large ski resorts. Most well-known are Valle Nevado and Portillo. But there are even so me smaller one - and the most interessting of them is Ski Arpa.

Ski Arpa is not a ski resort in the traditionell way - there are no lifts, no runs, no tracks, no hotels, no apres ski… Ski Arpa is pure freeskiing! The Austrian Toni Sponar founded it quite some of years ago, and after some backlashs, he runs the resorts with two snowcats now. That doesn’t sound like much, but it is great! First of all, there is pure open terrain and you are free to ride wherever you want to. Second, a ride in a snowcat up to the top is always fun. How did someone had the idea for such a resort - you may ask. Well we had plenty of time to talk to Toni (as he gave us a ride in his pickup). Toni used to design ski resorts and still is an active skiing instructor in Aspen. When he came to Chile some decades ago, he helped to design Portillo. Thus he was flying in a plane across the Andes. And he did not only found the place for Portillo, but even his own place for a perfect resort. So he bought the mountain and founded his own resort, that he runs in the Chilean winter, while he still works in Aspen in the North American winter.

But now some facts:

• Ski Arpa is situated some 1,5h driving out of Los Andes (approx. 2h driving from Santiago to the North)
• As the road is a very rough dirt road you should have 4×4 drive
• Take some 2-3 days for Ski Arpa. Even if you are a fast skier, you will not make more than 3-4 runs per day. It takes the cats roughly 45 minutes to drive up.
• Take your food and drinks with you as the is no restaurant.
• Quite a good place to stay is Termas de Corazon - a 50 years old wellness resort. It has nice rooms, plenty of pools - but don’t expect to much from the catering. And be prepared for Bingo, Sining, etc. at dinner - the atmosphere in the dinning room is more like a sanatorium
• If you can, take your hiking stuff with you. There is Valle Honda, a wide open bowl - that is perfect for some lines! You can reach it within half an hour hiking from the top from Alto del Arpa. On the map you can see our round-trip - allow 2-3 hours.
• Form Alto del Arpa you have awesome views towards the Aconcagua!

Here are some of our Ski Arpa pix

Skiing terrain and skiing map

And the wayfaring points for the runs

This is just a test post for my latest wordpress plugin - the lightbox 2 for a nice flash presentation of images. Ad guess what, it works!