The Hills Are Alive!
There’s a castle nestled in the mountains just an hour outside of Munich, Germany, on the road to Austria. It’s perched high above the valley floor, looming over pastures and the two-lane highway that aims southeast toward the Austrian Alps. We’d taken the scenic route—the historic pitstop was just an hour out of the way and it was an easy decision to append some cultural flare to the drive. At the Neuschwanstein castle, paragliders took flight in droves, launching from the cliffs surrounding the royal fortress and dotting the sky like colorful balloons. We zipped effortlessly through the Bavarian countryside in a black BMW M5—which we’d soon find would illicit snickers and sneers from our Austrian hosts who weren’t as impressed with the merit of German heritage. Driving the Beamer on its home turf was a thrill, a fitting precursor of the experience we’d get on Atomic skis in their hometown, a few days later. For now, however, we passed fields of white asparagus, cows nibbling on grass, small restaurants and cottages worthy of a summer holiday. Eventually, our winding detour converged with the Autobahn, just as the sun was setting. Heading into Austria toward the small village of Altenmarkt, the landscape changed dramatically. Mountains—jagged and jutting straight up from the ground—surrounded the highway as it wove into Altenmarkt. The skies grew grayer as scattered clouds moved and melded overhead, and the disappearing sun gave a subdued, pink glow to the landscape.
The following morning, we met our “main man,” Dominic Tritscher, the sports marketing manager at Atomic. Born in a neighboring town of Altenmarkt, where Atomic houses its main factory and offices, Dom seemed a relatively reserved 30-something family man at first. Turns out, the guy is a firecracker & has knack for pushing speed limits on his custom Harley Davidson motorcycle. Nothing short of obsessed with skiing, he also exhaled information about the sport and Atomic’s history like a chainsmoker, and proved a top-notch, multi-lingual guide as we toured the factory, met product designers and skied on the nearby Kitzsteinhorn glacier during our week-long stint in Austria…
