Nate AbbottSimon Dumont getting shot, getting the shot. Get it?

Day 1

[Ed. Note: ESPN Freeskiing contributor Nate Abbott is traveling around Austria right now with Simon Dumont, TJ Schiller and Jossi Wells, among others. Here, some dispatches from the road.]

With Euro X Games in the books (and Chug Life's camera smashed by Tom Wallisch), the Nike 6.0 and Poorboyz crew set out for Austria -- specifically, the Arlberg region. With weekend traffic that put the I-70 commute from Summit County to Denver to shame, we spent the entire day packed into a succession of vans: the first one helmed by Nike team mentor Jake Largess, the second by Jossi Wells (fresh off his third place finish in Slopestyle yesterday. Armed only with a street number, town name, failing Blackberry batteries and Twitter, we somehow stumbled our way into an apartment packed with two filmers, four skiers, and one photographer. This meant that Simon Dumont and TJ Schiller were both on pullout couches, and Jossi and I were on the hard wood floor. It's unclear how the filmers claimed the beds, but I guess since they set us up, we'll have to be fine with that. After a quick peep show of the PBP scouting mission and some planning for tomorrow, it's off to bed now.

Nate AbbottBene Mayr took us to this little resort, and for that, we are grateful.

DAY 2

Well, we woke up to sunny skies. Surrounding us are the most incredible mountains, basically leaning in over you at every moment. Roads are covered by snowsheds or buried in tunnels, huge peaks are covered with avalanche mitigation fences, towns perch along ridges and snake through the valleys. The terrain is a playground built for skiing.

After getting some skis mounted for TJ Schiller -- new Coreupt Candide Thovex pro models, which look sick -- we headed up to St. Cristoph. Because of the long travel day and sunny previous week we decided to build a wall ride on an avalanche wall that protects huge power lines that run over the Arlberg Pass. Jossi dropped in first and was talking about it officially being the end of halfpipe contest season since he was shredding the bases and edges on skis that had been tuned to perfection for the X Games, Dew Tour and Euro X by laying them into the concrete doing alley-oop 180 to 180 out. Same program for Simon, who was going huge and doing right and left 180s off the wall. TJ was feeling a bit sick and didn't take many laps, but, being Teej, he still stuck one of the hugest airs of the day.

After that it was back to St Anton, where we witnessed some of the rowdiest après ski action I've ever seen -- a procession of bad ski carrying techniques, poor ski boot walking, and general stumbling. Our destination: the Funky Chicken, the nightly spot for dinner and watching shred movies including Session 1242 which has been our favorite.

Nate AbbottJossi Wells wrecked his pipe skis on the wall ride, so he decided to try his pow skis.

DAY 3

Build, build, build: digging, packing, smoothing on two jumps with nothing exciting about it except the anticipation. And actually, just being around a group of comedians for the day isn't that bad.

Nate AbbottEven if we filmed and shot some bigger lines, TJ Schiller and the whole group just wanted to jump off of anything to take advantage of landing in the fluff.

DAY 4

Forecast for 10 centimeters of snow turns into one of the sketchiest and most fun days of powder shredding in years. Super light snow dumping all night and day left us to ski pillows, cliffs, trees, avalanches plus all the steep and deep turns you could handle and turned us into a happy crew at the cars by day's end. Soaked from head to toe and exhausted, but days like this are few and far between and our return for a delicious dinner back at the Funky Chicken was well deserved.