TL;DR
Hintertux Glacier in Austria's Zillertal Valley climbs to 3,250 metres with 60 kilometres of pistes and 21 lifts. The terrain covers everything from wide glacier cruisers to steep freeride gullies dropping into alpine valleys. Here are the five runs that stood out most during a day on the mountain.
Hintertux Glacier sits at the head of Austria's Zillertal Valley, and with skiing from 1,500 to 3,250 metres across 60 kilometres of pistes, it delivered five runs worth talking about.
Hintertux's glacier terrain keeps snow reliable well beyond the point where lower resorts have packed it in for the season. The resort runs 21 lifts across a mix of wide beginner-friendly runs up high and steep freeride lines dropping into alpine gullies below. I spent a day here and came away with a clear top five - counted down from number five to number one.
Ranking my TOP 5 Favourite Runs at Hintertux in Austria 🇦🇹
5. Piste 17 - Tuxerjoch
When you step off the first Gletscherbus lift, everyone around you is scrambling to get higher as fast as possible. My advice is to resist that urge. Head over to the Tuxerjoch bubble chair instead and use this zone to warm up while the queues sort themselves out above you.
Piste 17 starts at 2,389 metres and drops 360 metres of vertical. It's marked blue on the piste map, but there's a middle section that gets noticeably steeper than you'd expect from a beginner grading - think of it as Falls Creek's Wombat's Ramble suddenly deciding it wants to be something else for 200 metres. Whether that caught me off guard because I was still finding my feet on skis at the time is debatable, but it's worth knowing about. This zone is also home to the Hintertux fun slope, which is a good option if you want to mix things up between laps.
