# Ski instructors in Mayrhofen

> The Zillertal's lively main town under the Penken and Ahorn, with the Harakiri, Austria's steepest groomed piste, a big terrain park and a 500 km valley pass.

- Region: Zillertal, Tyrol
- Country: [Austria](https://alpinepal.com/en/ski-instructors/austria)
- Time zone: Europe/Vienna
- Currency: EUR
- Coordinates: 47.16667, 11.86667
- Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q668214

Page: https://alpinepal.com/en/resorts/mayrhofen
Last reviewed: 13 September 2026

## About Mayrhofen

Mayrhofen is the biggest town in the Zillertal and its natural capital: a proper working place of 4,000 people at 630 m, with a long main street, a lot of hotels and a young, noisy crowd in winter. Two mountains rise straight from the town, reached by separate lifts. The Penken is the main event — a broad, busy area linked over the ridge to Finkenberg and to the Tux valley — and the Ahorn is a gentler, sunnier plateau reached by Austria's largest cable car.

The Penken is home to the Harakiri, a groomed piste with a gradient of 78 per cent that is the steepest in Austria; it is short, often icy, and skied mainly so people can say they have. More relevant to most visitors is the Penken Park, one of the best-regarded terrain parks in Europe, and the fact that the Zillertal Superskipass covers every lift in the valley, from the Hintertux glacier to the Zillertal Arena, for around 500 km of piste in total.

Mayrhofen's weakness is the lack of a piste back to town: you ride the gondola down from the Penken at the end of the day like everyone else, and the queue for it can be long. In April the town hosts Snowbombing, a week-long music festival that is either the reason you are here or the reason to book a different week.

## Where lessons start

Beginners go up the Ahorn, where the top of the cable car opens onto a wide, sunny, self-contained plateau of easy pistes — it is genuinely one of the better beginner set-ups in Tyrol, and far calmer than the Penken. The catch is that everything is reached by lift, so a first lesson starts with a cable-car ride and there is no sliding around at village level. Mayrhofen's real strength is for snowboarders and freestylers and for strong intermediates using the valley pass to ski a different area every day.

## Getting there

Innsbruck airport is about an hour by road, Munich two hours, Salzburg two as well. By train you change at Jenbach on the main Innsbruck–Salzburg line onto the narrow-gauge Zillertalbahn, which trundles up the valley to Mayrhofen in just under an hour — slow but charming, and occasionally steam-hauled. The valley road backs up badly on Saturdays.

## Resort areas

- Penken
- Ahorn

## Instructors at Mayrhofen

_No instructors have joined here yet._

## Qualifications required in Austria

Teaching for payment in Austria requires the Skilehrer qualification, issued by Landesskilehrerverband.

## Frequently asked questions

### Is the Harakiri really that hard?

It is very steep — 78 per cent, roughly 38 degrees — and short, a few hundred metres of fall line that is groomed by a winch cat and freezes hard. A confident advanced skier who can hold an edge on ice will get down it; anyone who has to sideslip will find it long and unpleasant. It closes when conditions are bad. Go early in the morning after grooming, not at three in the afternoon.