Scheffau & Archenkirch 2003 - 3 different skibobs in one week -  23/03/2003 Brendan West

Scheffau is part of the Ski-World Area (SKiWelte) which in the largest interconnected ski area in Austria. It has 93 lifts and 250km of pistes. It is also a 10 minute drive from Soll. Colin Rouse and I booked with a late deal and flew from London Gatwick to Salzburg with Thomson Travel. It was last minute and we didn't know the hotel we would be staying at. As it turned out we stayed in a nice hotel in Scheffau which was a 3 minute ski-bus ride the the gondala station.

Renting Skibobs
We rented Brenter C4 skibobs from the ski-shop at the Gondola station on Soll (Soll Details available in the resorts link). The next problem was Colin's snowboard boots (very big) did not fit into the borrowed bindings. We were lucky enough to get the straps extended on the bindings. With that we obtained ski passes and toured the vast SkiWelte area.

Colin on rented Brenter C4	Charlie from Munich with Colin Rouse

K2 Gravity Tool
Colin decided he wanted to try a K2 Gravity Tool. He is around 6ft 4 high and wanted to be a little more upright. He hired the K2 from Snowell Rent and Go  www.snowell.com at the base of the Gondola at Scheffau. K2's are made of alloy Aluminium I think and designed to be ridden without foot-skis using the 2 sets of pegs provided. Colin opted to ride with foot skis on as you can see from the picture below. The rental shop kindly removed the read foot pegs so that they didn't get in the way. I decided to stick with the Brenter for the duration of my stay. On our travels we bump into Charlie and friends from Munich. We skied with them for a couple of hours then went our separate ways.

Colin Rouse on K2 Gravity tools	Racer at Archekirch

Skibob World Championships at Munster / Archekirch (Austria)
We had arranged to meet up with Jacek Stalmach at Archenkirch to try out the "Stalmach Snow-Horse" skibob.  We had a great couple of days watching the racing ski-bobbing and taking photographs. Jacek kindly gave us a little tour of the place and was extremely hospitable. It was great to be in a place with so many ski-bobbers. There must have been at least 180 skibobs at the event. We event saw a number of customer made skibobs, one of which is pictured below. The build quality of the customer bobs was fantastic. Some of the British racing team were attending the event and we had chance to have a few quiet beers at the after ski event hosted in Munster.

Jacek Stalmach in action on  the Snow-Horse	Racer on Customer made skibob

All in all we had a great week and had the opportunity to try 3 different skibobs. For More information, please check out the links below.