72 hours in St. Johann in Tirol, Austria: a photo diary

Does anybody else feel like winters have been different the past couple of years? When I was little, we would be outside all the time, playing in the snow, building igloos and snowmen, or sledding down the hill behind our house.

These days, it feels like winters across Europe are mostly grey, rainy, and — let’s be frank — a little ugly. It’s hardly a winter wonderland. The brown of the mud is the new white and the closest thing resembling a white winter is hail.

It is for this reason that I was super excited to go on a little weekend getaway to the Austrian Alps at the start of January. It had been years since I’d been able to go skiing and I’d forgotten just how much I love this sport.

When we arrived in St. Johan, we were greeted with grey skies and muddy ground. But overnight, everything changed. The landscape transformed into all there is to love about winter — blankets of snow covering everything from fields to rooftops, and magical snowflakes falling from the sky.

All you gotta do is hit the slopes, spend as much time outside as you can, and warm yourself up in a cozy mountain hut before you do it all over again.

If you haven’t been having a particularly pretty winter this year, I hope these images serve as a little getaway from the greyness into the magical winter wonderland that are the Austrian Alps.