Winter vacation: Damüls in Vorarlberg: The boy and the Hutschn coup

The clouds over the Glatthorn are already glowing pink as Sarah Bodon trudges up the ridge path to the Stofel chapel. Immediately after the stop, the 32-year-old set off again with her friend. Because she really wants this photo of herself, just as she saw it on Instagram: swinging in the snow, in front of the highest peaks of the Bregenzerwald.

The swing made of solid oak is four meters high and stands like a huge picture frame just below the tiny chapel. “We had to queue here at noon,” says Bodon, so many skiers and winter hikers were waiting – and only adults. Some friends at home in Stuttgart have already reacted to their freshly sent photos: “Cool, I want to go there too!”

A breath of fresh air through “the boy”

Mathias Klocker listens to all this with a satisfied smile. The managing director of Damüls Faschina Tourismus took office in August 2021. At 25 years old. To this day, the people in the village call him “the boy”. Klocker knows it: At 18 he became a news presenter at Antenne Vorarlberg, “no one believed me capable of that either”.

The mountain swings are Klocker’s first coup. “They stand 100 percent for what I want to represent,” he says: “The plain, the simple in nature.” Because that’s why the guests from the big cities come here, to this mountain village in Vorarlberg.

Damüls is 1435 meters above sea level, although that is a relative value. There is no clear center, the approximately 330 residents have spread their houses over the slopes – as is typical for the Walser people. The poor immigrants from Valais were once assigned remote fallow land that nobody wanted.

The residents of such villages are rarely ardent advocates of the new and unusual. And so the reaction to the boy’s suggestion was to be expected: swinging in the snow, what a crazy idea – and without a big logo, as you know it from selfie picture frames in other ski areas. “Why not just a playground?” some asked.

The Hutschn from Bavaria

But Klocker was undeterred. And after a long search, he found three craftsmen who were able to implement his idea – in the “Broadcast with the Mouse”. Because the three come from the Bavarian town of Bischofswiesen, the swings are called Hutschn according to the local dialect.

Four of these Hutschn have been set up since October 2021. Not all are easy to find. Some are well off the slopes. “I was concerned with taking the most beautiful places,” explains Klocker, “not the most popular ones.”

When swinging, guests should change their perspective, he says, forget their stress and feel childlike joy. And, of course, do free advertising on social media. The calculation works: every second photo posted with the keyword #damuelsfaschina now shows the Hutschn.

Once certified as the snowiest village in the world

Unlike the tourism experts in many ski areas, Klocker does not normally have to worry about the white mountain scenery. In 2006, the mayor received a certificate that put it in writing: Damüls was the snowiest permanently inhabited village in the world. An average of 9.30 meters of fresh snow was measured per season over a period of five years.

The people of Damüls owe the large amount of snow to the north-west congestion. Moisture-soaked clouds from the west meet the Arlberg here and snow falls – similar to nearby Warth-Schröcken, which also lays claim to the title of the snowiest village in the world and holds against it with its own record statistics.

“The values ​​fluctuate every winter, but we’re still in the same range,” says Klocker. Nevertheless, the first snow cannons were set up as early as 1990, and 160 of them are now spewing artificial white onto the slopes. The guests have become demanding. Some even write reproachful emails when the grooves of the snow groomers have been snowed over overnight.

Powder attracts freeriders

Many others here don’t care, their hearts really warm up when they see untouched slopes. The prospect of deep snow is attracting more and more freeriders to Damüls. “When it has snowed, they stand in line at the valley stations in the morning and wait for things to start,” says Christian Klocker.

The 42-year-old skied off-piste even as a primary school student. Klocker has been a ski instructor for a quarter of a century. But what he loves most is showing guests the best deep-snow slopes.

To warm up, we first take one of the many ski routes. They make it possible to ski relatively safely off-piste in deep snow. The ski routes are not groomed, but secured.

“We know all the spots where things get tricky,” says Klocker. However, the routes are only safe from avalanches in the immediate vicinity of the diamond signs. Ski route 5 through a high valley along the rock faces of the Ragazer Schrofen is particularly beautiful.

On this day, however, only the outlines of the walls can be seen, the weather is typically Damuels. The snowflakes crackle as they hit the protective plastic hood of the chairlift, outside the wind howls. When we lift the cocoon over our heads, all we can see is a featureless white.

Nevertheless, Klocker confidently finds one wonderful descent after another – and of course fresh powder snow. He could probably shake dozens of untouched slopes out of his sleeve.

Damuels