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Most mountain guides grow up in Alpine villages and follow their fathers' crampon steps into the mountains. So it's all the more impressive that Austick, one of the most innovative guides working in Europe today, grew up in Newcastle and started out working for his dad's electrical engineering firm. "After a while it was a case of 'Son, you ain't going to fit in here'," he says. "I spent every possible spare minute skiing, so pretty soon I decided I had to make it my career."
After parting company with his dad, aged 19, Austick moved to St Anton, Austria, and by 2000 had become the first Briton to have both the top British skiing-instruction qualification and the highest-level mountain guiding certificate. The same year, he set up Piste to Powder, a ski school specifically catering to the growing number of people who wanted to ski off-piste. Rather than hiring a private guide for at least £250 a day, it meant individuals could turn up, pay a flat fee (this winter £71) and join a group of a similar standard. A simple idea, but traditional Alpine ski schools have always been slow to innovate, and copycat operations are only now starting to pop up in the Alps.
But Austick didn't stop there. Recognising that more and more skiers were looking for adventures away from crowded resorts, he started running trips to ever more remote slopes - from Greenland to Alaska, Russia, the Himalayas and South America. Austick pushed into the least visited areas, until clients were skiing down mountains that had never been climbed, let alone skied before. In Alaska, the group travelled into the wilderness on a ski-equipped light aircraft then set up camp, in Greenland they arrived by dogsled. |
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Now Austick has a new focus - the Lyngen Alps in arctic Norway. "When I first went I'd never seen anywhere like it for skiing - super mountains, great snow, and your final turns finish on the beach where the waves are breaking." He started ski trips in the area based on a chartered sail boat, but has now built his own wilderness lodge, from which skiers are ferried by speed boat to different mountains each day. "For your average alpine skier, the concept of skiing untracked powder, and ending up on the beach, is just bananas really."
Â¥ Top tip: "Ski touring [using sticky skins attached to skis to climb uphill, rather than ski lifts] is coming into its own. Heliskiing is fun, but there's a level of stress that you don't get with ski touring. People are wanting to come back to the roots and get back to the real feeling of being in mountains."
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