Fire & Ice

Last winter was an unusally long and snowy one. Still in April all of the surrounding mountains
were covered with snow. Despite that fact Martin came up with a "good" idea:
Riding with our bikes up a well known mountain near Graz, stay for the night
in a tent and head for the downhill the next morning!
Martin H. was also crazy enough to join us. ;-)
We knew that the weather was going to be bad - about minus 2°, tense fog and snowfall ...
We were all surprised how much snow there was on this mountain (1445 m a.s.l.).
30" of snow everywhere and we had the 6th of April!

After riding up and some fooling around on a kind of ski slope we searched for a good place
to put up our tent. Martin was eager to build a igloo, so we shoveld like crazy, good thing was
it kept us warm. Meanwhile we tried to start a fire, which took us a long time because
of the snowfall. After hours of digging we compared our nearly finished igloo with our tent ...
the tent looked much more comfortably!

The night wasn´t that cold as feared (because my sleeping bag is only good for about +5°),
anyhow we got up before 6 o´clock, slipping in our cold clothes and frozen shoes.

The bikes were covered with ice, the brakes and the suspension needed some time
till they worked properly.
The downhill was great, a nice singletrack and the cold snow had a good grip.

If you ask yourself why are our backpacks so small?: There is a cablecar on this mountain,
so we transportated the big parts with it.

All in all it was a real good trip, something you will remember for a long time!