After winning the 2024 Freeride World Tour, Max Hitzig took a year off from competition. But he still trains in his home region, the Montafon in western Austria, and is pushing into the backcountry more and more.
The morning sun colors snow-covered spruces orange, and Max Hitzig’s purple hat bobbles as his alert brown eyes scan the slopes from the gondola. Snow crystals glisten on the ground. From above it looks as if they are bubbling up like the carbon dioxide in champagne. “It’s going to be a cool day,” Hitzig says. Most skiers can see it coming this morning: The sky is blue, and there are 8 inches of fresh snow. But Hitzig has a different idea of what that means than everyone else in the Silvretta Montafon ski resort in the north-west of Austria.
Max Hitzig won the 2024 Freeride World Tour, the world championship in off-piste skiing, and he calls this little corner of Austria home. The entire tourist region in the Montafon sits in a 25-mile-long valley in the westernmost Austrian state of Vorarlberg. It’s not as well-known as the neighboring Arlberg with Lech and St. Anton, and it has less glamor, après-ski hype and highly developed peaks. But at least it goes up to 8,000 feet.
The Montafon feels like Switzerland but it’s much cheaper. While 2.2 million overnight guests came to the Montafon last year, the destination is still an insider tip for travelers from the United States. Yet the area is great for off-piste skiing. “We have everything here—rocks for jumping, slopes of varying steepness,” says Max Hitzig, in his Montafon dialect-tinged singsong, his voice rising at the end of the sentence. “But lines are easier to assess than many other areas, the descents aren’t as long, there’s rarely any danger of falling. All in all, it’s perfect terrain for training.” His calm and collected attitude isn’t typical for a 22-year-old. But perhaps that’s no wonder for a man who has to make decisions every day on which his survival depends. It was here in this area, in the Nova Valley, that he once made his first freeride descents.
“You used to be able to find untracked deep snow days after the first snowfall,” says Hitzig. “But in the ski resort, those days are over.” He shrugs his shoulders. “Of course, we pros also promote this by posting pictures and videos.” Hitzig is never out and about without his helmet camera and makes short videos for Instagram, which are popular with his sponsors who finance his life. Right on queue, Hitzig races straight ahead through flattened snow towards a lip about the height of a beer crate, catapults himself 10 feet high and does a backflip. He stomps it and continues as if nothing had happened. Someone on the side of the slope shakes their head in disbelief. It’s just a normal day out for Hitzig. His winning run in Kicking Horse, Canada, 2023—headlined by him flipping off a 60-foot cliff—is one of the most absurd lines you’ll ever see.
“Our job is to work creatively with what nature offers,” says Hitzig as he makes his way up the chairlift. Meanwhile, he searches the slopes around him for cliff hits and untouched powder. “Oh, there’s a dangerous rock,” he says, pointing downwards with his ski pole. He speaks from experience. At the beginning of the winter, with little coverage, he hit on a barely covered rock and broke two vertebrae. This year he is skipping the Freeride World Tour. A week and a half ago, Hitzig dislocated his shoulder when he had to catch himself with his hand after an unsuccessful trick. You could be forgiven for thinking that his sport is extremely dangerous. “It’s easy to get injured, but we have fewer serious accidents than alpine and freestyle skiers,” says Hitzig.
There is a sign at the top of the mountain—an outstretched hand on a bright orange background warns of “avalanche danger” away from the piste. Max Hitzig lifts up the barrier tape that separates the piste from the so-called free ski area and slips underneath it. Behind it, the ski area no longer ensures safety. But Hitzig grew up in the backcountry. His father is a mountain guide and took his son off-piste at an early age. Hitzig reaches into the powder with his glove and digs his way down until he comes across a solid layer. “It’s almost ice down there,” he says. “If the snow wasn’t so loose on top, we wouldn’t be standing here today.” The fresh snow can slide on the hard surface, but it is so loose that it does not bond together. There’s no slab characteristics yet. “It’s very safe here today,” says Hitzig. You get the feeling that he knows exactly what he is doing. Once, as a teenager, he was in an avalanche. “I wasn’t completely buried, but that was a lesson for me,” he says of the incident.
He skis further away from the ski area. Suddenly it is quiet, untouched powder sparkles in the sun. It’s what all freeriders are looking for. Hitzig takes out his helmet camera and shakes his head. “Well, I’ve been filming my jacket pocket for another hour.”
A man in his 40s trudges past him, followed by a boy of about nine. He looks up. “Are you Max Hitzig?” he asks. Hitzig smiles and nods. “Cool,” says the boy and walks on. Apparently, there’s no time for small talk or a souvenir photo, the powder won’t be untracked for long.
Hitzig switches on the camera, sets off and gains speed, then turns his skis sideways for a moment. There is a dusting, and then, as if the snow cover is exploding, Hitzig is no longer visible. He shoots sideways out of the cloud, races towards an edge, takes off and makes a turn, lands, skis on and stops with and in another eruption. As the snow cloud clears, a grinning Hitzig stands there. “Amazing—such light snow.”
In the afternoon, Hitzig drives down into the valley towards his parents’ house. The houses in the Montafon are spread far and wide across the valley floor, the legacy of the Walser people who came here in the Middle Ages. Each family built a farm on their own plot of land, which became smaller and smaller over the years. Hitzig passes the church in his home village of St. Gallenkirch, built in the 15th century and later fitted with an onion dome. “But I’ve never actually been up here,” he says. “I come from Galgenul!” He points to the opposite side of the mountain, where houses stretch far up the slope. It’s an even smaller district—the elementary school he attended had eight pupils.
Hitzig moved to Innsbruck last year, to his first apartment of his own. But as he drives up the hairpin bends to his parents’ house, past snow-covered meadows, spruce trees and rooftops, he shakes his head. “Sometimes I think—who am I to have moved away from here?” In the Montafon, he could ski from his front door down to the cable car, but now he has to drive 30 miles to get to a good freeride area. He parks the car opposite his parents’ house. His mother is waiting inside. As dusk falls and the lights gradually come on in the valley, Hitzig looks at his parents and says, “One day, I’m sure I’ll live here again.”
Related posts: