So, the "Masters of Disaster" tour of Turbacz started 2 hours late. There was accident on the road, so Zuber got stuck in the traffic and arrived late to pick me up. We bought some food and drinks, drove to Koninki, changed in a hurry and set off. Leaving the map of the trails in the boot of his car... When we found out that we did not bring the map, it was too late to go back and pick it up.

...it's so easy to leave the map in the boot....

We followed the blue trail from Koninki to Turbacz. It turned out to be the shortest and steepest trail. The worst thing was that the trail has been used by tourists on foot, so it was to narrow for our Prior boards. So we had to  set our own trail next to it - it was much more tiring. 

Walking next to the narrow trail

We were only half way up, when it started to get dark. Good thing we had a GPS.

Trail disappearing into the night

"Snow flakes falling on my head...."

After 4 hours of hiking, we got to the hut on Turbacz. We were quite tired at that stage. Some stretching is always good to keep the stiffness away...

.... not to mention some piwo.

Great view from our window next morning.

The next morning was supposed to be very easy. Just hike to the top of Turbacz (about 15 minutes) and then ride down to Koninki....

Ready to leave the hut.

At the top of Turbacz - quick change into snowboard mode and ...

... a few posed pictures, before....

...we headed down, through the trees.

The tree run was great - lots of powder (up to 2m) and well spaced trees

Unfortunately it was a run into the wrong valley... we only found that after 2 hour hike through the valley. We got to a village and were quite surprised to find it was the wrong one. Fortunately someone pointed us in the right direction. Turned out we had another 1 hour of hiking to get back to the top and then just ride down to the car.

Finally at the right place, just an easy run down to the car now...

Well, almost. Cause we went off-piste again... so as opposed to a 15 minute ride, we had a 20 minute ride off-piste and another hour of hiking :) At this time I was getting pretty tired of all the hiking. If it wasn't for the fact, that we simply had no choice, I wouldn't go anywhere.

By the time we got back to Krakow (6pm as opposed to planned 11:30 am) I was so tired that I could not function normally and sleep, so we went out drinking that night and that healed all the damage !

The map below shows the route we took. The red dots are the GPS tracks from Saturday - we were walking up, following a blue trail. All was good. On Sunday we were supposed to follow red trail, and then board down off piste... the yellow dots show our planned route. The green dots are our actual route.... a bit different from our plans...

Click on the picture to see it full screen...

2005-09-14 - Żuber started playing around with Google Earth -  http://earth.google.com and came up with those VR images of our path (click on image to see a bigger picture):