From ice skating to tobogganing to drifting: the most beautiful winter activities – travel

The mountain is the Wildkogel above Bramberg in Salzburger Land, a popular ski area. The start is at 2100 meters, and these are dimensions where you no longer pull the sleigh up on foot, but take the cable car. Tobogganing is highly professionalized here: the sports shops in town have a four-digit number of rental toboggans available, and the long descent is a popular, happy group activity after a day of skiing.

And, hey, once you get to the top, it’s really fun. Steering, braking, avoiding passengers – that’s a lot of work for inexperienced city sledders. But at least that’s the advantage of long-distance tobogganing, after 13.5 of the 14 kilometers you finally get it.

By the way: In the state of Salzburg, children and young people up to the age of 15 are required to wear a helmet not only on ski slopes, but also on toboggan runs. Protection is also recommended for adult heads.

Getting there: A visit to the toboggan run is particularly recommended if you are already on a winter holiday in the region (the ski pass can also be used for tobogganing until 4:15 p.m., but evening rides cost extra). Brambach am Wildkogel can be reached by train and bus, for example from Zell am See.

Stop by: Halfway there you can stop at the “Zwischenzeit” mountain hut. Fine Austrian cuisine is available in Bramberg in the Weyerhof restaurant.

Eva Dignös

Drifting with a sports car in Sölden

You dance the snow waltz with sturdy shoes and a shovel in your luggage. You should also have a head for heights when everything is spinning and the Ötztal Alps pass by the side window. Even four-wheel drive cars quickly become dancing humming tops in winter when the surface is really slippery. As feared as skidding is in everyday life, it is a lot of fun during driver training on Europe’s highest training ground. The view is great and the run-out on the snow-covered glacier in Sölden is wide.

Sliding friction means that the wheels with their palm-sized footprints suddenly turn out to be runners. The brain sends an SOS and tries to keep the twitching brake foot under control. If you brake too hard, you lose. That’s the first lesson you learn in the white-blue glacial sea. This can be easily practiced with a firm pull on the handbrake: if the rear wheels suddenly lock, the car will slip. On slippery surfaces, even the electronic anti-skid system ESP doesn’t always help.

In general, people with their reflexes: at the crucial moment, they often instinctively do the wrong thing. For example, brake hard and turn the steering wheel. That’s not a good idea on dry slopes; on snow and ice, such a skidding program is fatal. Realizing how little you actually have control over your car is a big learning experience. If you turn off the electronic helpers on the mirror-smooth parquet, you can sometimes shovel the car out of the snowdrift. This contributes to team building under the ice-clear sun and deepens learning success.

Only after a few hours of driver training and the smell of mulled wine from the windshield washer do you get an idea of ​​how to drift around curves in winter. But even then, the waving tail often triggers a double pirouette. As with trick skiing, the trick is to get back on track. But the deepest realization is simply this: take your foot off the gas on slippery roads. After a training weekend you drive down the mountain with a big grin, but above all you do this: leisurely. (bmw-m.com)

Getting there: If you don’t want to travel with your own car, you can easily take the train to Ötztal train station, from where there are coordinated bus connections to Sölden, oebb.at

Stop by: Ice Q gourmet restaurant on the 3,000-meter-high Gaislachkogl, known from the James Bond film “Spectre,” with two toques from Gault Millau – considering the price of the driving training, that doesn’t matter. (iceq.at)

Joachim Becker

Ice skating on the frozen moor of the Sterntaler Filze

It’s an indescribable feeling: being the first to do your laps on so-called black ice with skates. And in the middle of the moor, which was previously only known from spring, when you can see such rare beauties like the lapwing, the marsh harrier or the stonechat from the observation tower and the air is filled with mosquitoes and bird songs. But in winter, after temperatures have been below zero for two weeks in a row, which is a rarity, all you can hear is the scratching of the skate blades. White scratch marks cross the black ice. The Sterntaler Filze south of Rosenheim is a former peat mining area that has been waterlogged again and in this way not only offers a habitat for birds and insects, but also natural space for people. The nice thing about it is that you can walk on the huge ice surfaces in winter everywhere that is a nature reserve in summer and where you don’t want to go because otherwise you would end up as a bog corpse.

But if you catch the right moment, like in the first half of January 2025, when the ice is already thick (of course you have to be very careful), you can experience something here that is usually found in the Canadian wilderness or on Swiss mountain lakes: gliding for miles through beautiful nature, with a view over ice, reeds and dead trees sticking out of the ice, always towards the mountains.

As soon as the word gets around, the ice rink naturally fills with families, sledding dogs and ice hockey players. Matches are played, with your own children and complete strangers, until the sun sets and the sky and ice surface glow a warm orange. Then it’s time to go somewhere warm, preferably to an inn, of which there are quite a few in the villages around the moor. A punch or a not too cold beer is the end of a perfect winter day.

Getting there: It’s best to go to the parking lot at the Nicklheim moor station, from there about a ten-minute walk to the moor.

Stop by: For example in the Gasthaus Schwarzlack in Brannenburg (gasthaus-schwarzlack.de) or at the Kistlerwirt in Bad Feilnbach, kistlerwirt.com

Hans Gasser

Icicle hiking through the Partnach Gorge

Of course, the Partnachklamm is beautiful all year round, this narrow, cathedral-high gorge near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, which conveniently starts right behind the town, which of course brings with it a lot of crowds, but at the same time makes this fascinating natural architecture accessible to those who otherwise can’t make it to the mountains. White, gray and turquoise, the Partnach foams between vertical rock faces, it goes up to 80 meters and you have to tilt your head back to see a little piece of sky.

In winter it gets a little quieter in the gorge, although after a certain number of days of frost and snow it looks even more magnificent. Meter-high icicles then hang from the walls, some as thick as pillars, some as fine as needles. They slide over the rocks like lace curtains, as if someone from above had dumped tons of icing into the gorge. Frozen waterfalls glitter in different shades of blue depending on the light, and the river steams its way along. Sounds like an AI has created a winter fairy tale? Might be. But it’s real.

Paths and footbridges through the gorge are easy to walk on with sensible footwear, even in winter: the ice spectacle conveniently takes place primarily vertically. Grödel – a kind of spikes for your shoes – should still be packed in your backpack; they provide better grip on slippery passages. In dangerous weather conditions the gorge is closed; current information is available on the website partnachklamm.de

Getting there: It starts at the ski stadium in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, accessible either by train and bus or by car.

Stop by: The Klammhaus is located very close to the Klamm entrance (klammhaus-partnach.de). And on the way back to the valley you pass the Kaiserschmarrn-Alm. (kaiserschmarrn-alm.de)

Eva Dignös

Velogemelfahren in Grindelwald

Regional linguists can already tell from the name that the Velogemel must be an endemic Swiss, or more precisely: Grindelwald sleigh vehicle. Velo stands for bicycle, while Gemel is a local dialect word for sleigh. And that’s exactly what the Velogemel looks like: like a bicycle sled.

You have to know that the snow bike was invented in 1911 out of necessity by the carpenter Christian Bühlmann, who had to live with a walking disability after suffering polio. This prevented him from driving a commercially available sleigh, of all places in Grindelwald. Because the place may be known among the Reinhold Messners of this world because of the north face of the Eiger and among Japanese tourists because of the ascent to the Jungfrau Joch. But strictly speaking, Grindelwald is even more the stronghold of the toboggan movement!

There are 50 kilometers of toboggan runs here, you can go evening and night tobogganing, there are your own toboggan passes, and with the so-called Big Pintenfritz there is also the longest toboggan run in the Alps, 15 kilometers of tobogganing fun. Because tobogganing was already happening in Grindelwald when toboggans were still called Hornschlitten or Murri or Beinz, at least before the Japanese and the Messners and any visitors came, Bühlmann constructed the Velogemel out of maple and ash wood.

During a quick test with a rental bike from a sports shop, it quickly becomes clear why the vehicle is part of the canon of local winter sports: the rear remains dry, the high seating position makes it easy to get up and bridge short flat passages while sitting, like with a balance bike. At the Kleine Scheidegg mountain station (2061 m), the cyclist is already faced with the choice of whether to plunge down to Wengen or race along the railway tracks in the shadow of the Eiger north face to Grindelwald in order to descend again from the First. No matter which run you choose, they are all fantastic and luckily you can do several in one day. You pass the Wengernalp, Alpiglen, Waldspitz, all mountain inns like something out of a Switzerland catalog, with mountains around them like mile-high hand axes.

The reason why Velogemeln hasn’t really made it beyond the Bernese Oberland yet may be because on hard slopes it feels like downhilling on a Dutch bike and any inattention – especially every Aperol Spritz – is punished in the next hairpin bend.

Getting there: It’s best to take the train either to Grindelwald or get off at Grindelwald Terminal one stop before.

Stop by: Too many huts to do in one day. But the modern Brandegg (brandegg.ch), the sun-baked Berggasthaus Waldspitz (gasthaus-waldspitz.ch) and the rustic Beizli Rasthysi offer a good mix.

Dominik Prantl