Somewhere in Austria's Mountains...

These pages contain some (useless ?!) information about and many pictures from an event that took place in February 1998 on a mountain in Styria (a district in the southern part of Austria), called Gaberl.
I have put up this site mainly as kind of electronic photo album, because there are quite a lot of people who would like to see the pictures. In addition, I realized that I have now been using the web completely passive for about two years, and so I was just keen on putting anything in there. I would like to thank the people of Fortune City for making this possible.

So, for those who just surfed in:

What's it all about ?

A few friends decided to spend a skiing weekend at the Gaberl. The whole thing was organized by Heimo, the guy who holds the paper in the picture below. As the highlight of the weekend, Heimo had announced a downhill race. Stefan, (first person left side on the photo) was sure that he would win, because no one and nothing could be faster than him on his snowboard. Well, this might be true, but it didn't help him very much, since Heimo had prepared some obstacles...
I, unathletic as I am, preferred to take some pictures.
Have fun !

The whole crew...
Click on the picture to enlarge.
Left to right: Stefan, Heimo, Christian & Daniela, Heli (at the fence), Hannes (front) & Sieglinde behind him, Harry (behind Sieglinde at the fence) - ok, you will see some much better photos of him later, Birgit (at the fence, red parka) also called "in Harry seine" (Harry's girl) because no one knew her name at the beginning. At the right Evi (Stefans girl-friend)

Some Impressions from the Gaberl...

Technical hints:
This site looks best with a screen resolution of 1024x768 and at least 32k colors.
The pictures are compressed to a size of abt. 30-60kB. This seemed to be the best compromise between getting an acceptable quality and not wasting excessive amounts of server space and bandwidth.

Here we go !

As already mentioned, skiing skills and speed didn't play an important role. The racers had to stop every few meters and prove their skills at some strange obstacles. By the way, I'm sure they could have been significantly faster without these troublesome boards at their feet...

The first station: liqueur egg flip.
Home brewed by Heimo's grandma and quite delicious.
And "Schwedenbomben". What the hell are Schwedenbomben ?
Well I don't know an English word for it, if you happen to know it, please tell me.
However, they mainly consist of chocolate and cream, just a matter of seconds...

A little snack for the hungry racers. It consisted of a roll (quite dry, indeed), a pickled gherkin and some orange juice. It took about one minute to get rid of that stuff..

Darts.
The goal was to make as little points as possible. Missing the target counted with the maximum number of points.

Ski jumping: The competitors had to jump over our virtual ski jumping platform. The length counted (I know, you already expected that).
Sometimes the fans jumped higher than the athlethes ;-)

The last stop:
Throw the sticks away and take the skiing-suit off Ok, trousers could be kept on ...

Snapshots

Don't miss these !

Finally, the winners !

Well, not that important, I think. But since the whole thing was a race, there just have to be some results. At least a winner.
In the evening Heimo locked himself up in his room to evaluate the results. He used a "secret formula" to calculate an overall result from the times or points of the individual events. It led to some rather amazing results - if you should ever need a good algorithm for a random number generator, ask Heimo for his formula ! ;-)
Ladies and men were rated separately.

So here they are !

Congratulations !

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Copyright notice: The images on these pages are intended to be viewed. They must not be copied or be used in any other form without the written approval of the people that can be seen on the image. ( I have no idea who might be interested in "abusing" these pictures, but you never know these days...)