Dream Vacation: Build Your Own Snowboard in Innsbruck, Austria

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The next time you decide to try out Innsbruck’s vaunted ski slopes, don’t worry about having to check a snowboard on the flight in. That’s because, as The Telegraph’s Simon Khalil gleefully reports, there’s a company there called Spurart that will sell you a custom-built, handcrafted board to fit your needs and style. What’s unique about Spurart is that they don’t build the board — you do.

Here’s how Khalil describes the Spurart exerience:

“Spurart, in Innsbruck, offers a weekend course at which, last winter, I did just that. For someone who struggles to wire a plug without following a YouTube video, the prospect of creating a piece of high-performance sports equipment felt daunting, to say the least. Fortunately, there was a team of experts to oversee my handiwork – including Michi Freymann, the former ski racer and Spurart founder, who has tested more than 15,000 pairs of skis.”

The weekend course sets you back €790 (about $980), which is a heck of a lot but probably not much of a dent if you’re already paying for a vacation in Innsbruck. For that price, you get an illuminating lesson on the delicate craft of constructing winter sports equipment. This includes cutting the template, sanding, shaping, affixing the base, installing metallic edges, applying the finish, adding the core, vacuum packing the thing, and baking it in a high pressure oven.

A few days later and you’ve got yourself a custom-built (by you) snowboard,

Watch below as Khalil details his experience and gives a newly-constructed board a test-ride on the Austrian slopes.