Spring Season 2022
Kayak Courses on the Schuls Gorge in Switzerland.
Spring was upon us and as we transitioned from skiing to kayaking our season started with a bang. We put together a Leadership plus Safety and Rescue course for Bobby. He was keen to learn more and improve his leading in whitewater as he is a core member of his kayaking club in Holland.
Water levels in Spring are at their optimum for the higher reaches in and around Base Arlberg and we were spending time on the various sections of our home rivers: the Rosanna and Lech on our Intro to Creeking course. The journey over to the River Lech is stunning, as we drive over 2 passes high above the deep and committing Lech Gorges. The River Lech provides the perfect place to work on technique, even though it is mostly Class 2 we can find places to put together some Class 4 moves and of course with Class 2 consequences it is the ideal way to improve your techniques and challenging moves within your comfort zone!
The River Rosanna is completely different to the Lech with more gradient and continuous rapids up in St.Anton. Further downstream in Pettneu, where the Rosanna once used to be a canal, we worked hard with the local municipality and government officials in charge of the river to develop more eddy’s and features. So what used to be a fast flowing bob down with not much going on has now turned into a great section for kayakers to work on catching those smaller eddy’s on the fast current that the Rosanna is so well known for!!
River Leading Courses with Kayak School Arlberg in Austria.
Andrew came for the first of his weeks kayaking in preparation for his forthcoming trip down the Grand Canyon of the Colorado in the US. The River Inn had good levels and even the Landeck Gorge was running! This is becoming something of a rarity due to the amount of dams that have and are being built on the River Inn. This part of Austria is the perfect place to work on the techniques and tactics of BIG water kayaking, it has been the training ground of many a Himalayan kayaking expedition and still continues to be. The Landeck Gorge, Toesens Gorge and the Imst Gorge sections of the River Inn provide a variety of BIG water at various grades and are such a fun paddle on the BIG and Bouncy waves and rapids.
We also welcomed back Gina and Eoghan. With a plan made for the week, we kayaked all the classics around Base Arlberg and up in the Engadine Region of Switzerland. This is what we love about Base Arlberg, we make day trips up to the Swiss Inn or over the pass into Bavaria to kayak one of Germany’s best rivers - the Loisach. They had a couple of sections that were on their hit list that they had not managed to do on their previous visits in late Summer and Autumn. Spring was the time and so they were super happy to bag those runs and to also kayak their favourites from their previous visits such as the Giarsun Gorge on the River Inn in Switzerland.
With our courses in full swing, we were getting news of extremely low water levels throughout the Alps. Some guests from the UK were getting nervous as their friends were coming back with stories of empty rivers in France and Italy but we reassured them that Austria will have plenty of water for a memorable trip. It had been a very dry Winter for the Alps and the Spring was also not providing the usual precipitation. Our Spring melt season, when our rivers are at their maximum,ka proved just to be 3 days long instead of the 1-2 weeks we usually have but still we were happy that we had water in our local rivers!
The courses kept on coming and as the days got longer and warmer we were moving into the Summer and peak season…