The Galzig Lift, St Anton, Austria

On the first day of skiing at St Anton I used the Galzig lift. As I stood there I thought ‘this is new’, and I was wondering what was wrong.

A day or two later I realised (remembered).

First, the lift mechanism is new (I subsequently found out it was renewed a few years ago) and the long zig-zag walk up to the lift had gone.

Second, the lift now runs the wrong way, that is, away from the mountain….

The way this all works is by an ingenious mechanism by which the cable car is lifted from a lower level, where you board, on to the main lift cable to run up the mountain. This means that you don’t have to walk back and forwards up to the cable level, and the lift appears to run in the wrong direction, that is, it is moving away from the mountain when you board. Anyway, this is all easier to see in a video: