Mountains, The Prodigy, No Plan

A friend named Wenke dragged me across Berlin on Saturday afternoon to sort out my winter wardrobe before the trip. We spent most of the day drinking on playgrounds instead, and I came home with a single tube of sunscreen. Preparedness, approximately. By the time this goes up I’m already on my way to Snowbombing—a week-long music festival staged improbably in the Austrian Alps, in the Zillertal valley, where the ski slopes and the stages and the wooden mountain bars all coexist in ways that sound better in theory than they probably feel at altitude after three days.

Mark Ronson is playing. The Prodigy. Fatboy Slim. Jamie Woon, whose voice belongs somewhere quieter and more intimate, but I’m not complaining. The rest of the crowd will largely be British—the kind that converts mountain huts into four-day drinking sessions with intermittent snowball fights, which is honestly fine by me. I’m planning to corner whoever will stand still long enough for some badly improvised interview questions and report back from whatever state I’m in by that point.

Wish me well. Or at least send advice about altitude sickness.