roemerfall

last weekend was awesome!

four days and so much happened.

micha scouting

the plan was to leave augsburg saturday morning. unfortunately the weather forecast wasn't the best at all. there was a big storm coming in from the north and its peak was supposed to hit the alps in the early afternoon. so matze, micha and i decided that it probably wasn't the best idea to hit the road in an old VW bus with a bunch of boats on the roof. we'd simply been blown away i guess.

roemerfall, photo micha

so we waited til the peak had passed us, checked the traffic reports (traffic jams everywhere, trees on the autobahn...), waited a bit longer and then finally headed off towards austria.

micha dropping in

the next morning the first river we hit was the brandenberger ache, one of the most beautiful runs in the northern alps. the nice thing about the brandy is that it has everything. small drops, bouldergardens, slides and pushy rapids. i hadn't run it in a while, which made it even more fun.
everybody had good lines and i even ran the "strahl", a rapid i always portaged the last times due to a hole feeding into a mean undercut.

late boof, photo matze

next thing up was kuchl, a really nice wave. the storm had brought lots of rain over night and brought the levels up. kuchl needs to be rather low - too bad that this time it wasn't. even the lower waves were almost flushed out. it still provided some good airtime, but it was so green that it was super hard to stick the moves. nevertheless a nice session just before sunset. exhausted i joined the other guys for a few beers...

matze a bit off line

with the last days being rather cold and stormy sunday came as a surprise, sunshine and temperatures of around 16°C proposed a good time!
a few days earlier i had seen pics of a drop close to kuchl called "roemerfall".
i've been to kuchl almost every year for the past eight years or so and never even heard of this one. and it turned out to be a really sweet drop. it is just above a really old roman bridge in vigaun and drops into a small gorge. the bridge is one of the oldest bridges in that area and still lasts car traffic. the drop itself is half slide half drop, measuring a total of around 8m, so it's pretty nice to practice late boofs. the pool was surprisingly pushy but good to go. we did quite a few runs, i had a bout six i think. for matze it was his biggest drop yet and it was sweet to see him style it on his first try. this was also the only photosession we did that weekend, the rest of the time we were too happy to just cruise down the rivers.
enjoy the shots taken by matze and myself.

slippery i guess, photo matze

after the drop we checked the lammer gorge nearby. i've run it several times, at normal flows it's a super scenic run. a first look from the bridges showed that it was pumping this time! it all seemed good to go so micha and i gave it a shot. lots of the steep walls in there are undercut and it gets so narrow that you don't even want to know how deep you would go if you'd swim. nevertheless it looked more than managable.
to cut things short: it was super fast and fun run, micha got trashed in the very beginning but made it out of that wall to wall hole and i did some unintentional holeriding at the very end of the gorge. lesson learned (again): scouting from far above makes you underestimate difficulties a lot.
again we finished the day off with a few beer and we cut my hair! i've had long hair for nine years now and got a bit bored of always looking the same. so i took some vodka, matze a swiss army knife and micha his camera and we did a bit of a barber session...

the garage and the trusty old vw

the next day temperatures dropped 15°C! it even started snowing.
so we decided not to go boating, went hiking and then headed home. well, at least we tried.
we made about ten km's and then the car broke down. automobileclub, vw bus on truck, next garage, broken part not in stock, one more night in the snow on the garage's parking lot in a pretty boring small village. damn! the next day everything was fine again so off we went.
this time we took twice as long for the ride home as usually due to some annoying traffic in and around munich.

mind the mullet, photo micha

awesome weekend, can't wait to go out again.

sven