- A German and Italian version of the website will be available soon -
WTF is SALTY?
SALTY is a trailrunning media and events collective that began the way most honest things do: someone wanted something that didn't exist yet, so they built it. The SALTY Journal is a print magazine published three times a year. We organise different events and races in the Alps. We run a podcast in Bavarian. We make a small collection of things worth owning. And we're building a membership for the people who want to be part of the work, not just watch from a distance.
Independent. Deliberately small. Occasionally trying to be funny. Whether that scales is a secondary concern.
WTF is SALTY Trail Club?
At some point you noticed that SALTY wasn't just a magazine or a race. It was a thing. The SALTY Trail Club is the annual membership that holds it together: Journal, races, merch, and community – kept independent by people who'd rather pay for something good than watch it get sponsored into something average. The Journal arrives early. Race spots are guaranteed. Special community events are real and exactly what they sounds like.
This is not a loyalty programme dressed up as belonging. It is, more honestly, the difference between watching something grow and being part of the reason it did.
WHO is SALTY?
SALTY is, first and most importantly, a lot of people. Volunteers who show up before dawn. Runners who travel from four countries to race with us. Photographers who hang around long after the last finisher. Readers who write to us about a single paragraph in volume 02. The three of us started it. Everyone else made it worth doing.
Stefan Götschl
Spent his formative years studying the cultural output of people doing backside 180s for cheap beer and the love of it. This turned out to be excellent preparation for trailrunning magazines. Former editor of Pleasure Snowboard Mag, writer, reader, photographer, overthinker, and Editor-in-Chief of the SALTY Journal. Runs ultras, which is either a logical outcome of reading too many books or a way to stop doing it for a few hours. Still unclear. Almost certainly thinking too hard about this.
Dominik Hartmann
Founding member of Freeski Crew, certified adrenaline junkie, and the person who started the Chiemgau Trail Run at a time when most people still thought trailrunning was just hiking with an identity crisis. SALTY's Race Director: responsible for courses, permits, safety calls, and the specific tension of a race office that makes everything else look effortless. Do not approach until the last runner has crossed the line. After that, he'll be at the DJ booth until 3am. The transition is seamless.
Stefan Ehrmeier
Optimist, stage hog, podcast host, and the unofficial community mayor of SALTY. Give him a microphone and three minutes of preparation and he will talk like he has been rehearsing for this his entire life. He hasn't. That's just how he is. Ultra runner, brand partnerships lead, and currently the world's most devoted fan of a running belt Dani once gave him: a loyalty that says everything you need to know about how Stefan moves through the world. You will not find a person with more genuine stoke for being alive. It's occasionally exhausting. Mostly infectious.
THE COLLECTIVE
There is a group chat. Several, actually. One of them has 47 unread messages that arrived between midnight and 6am debating a caption that will be read by roughly 4,000 people and rewritten four times. Someone is proofing Journal pages at 11pm with a glass of wine and a red pen, finding a typo on page 34 that would have bothered everyone for the next three years. Someone is packing merch orders in their living room, which was not in the job description, but there was no job description. A community run is happening somewhere right now where nobody is entirely sure who is leading, and everyone is fine with that.
And then there's race day. A checkpoint nobody planned to staff this long, a person in a headlamp handing broth to a runner who stopped talking coherently about 40 kilometres ago, a volunteer with a broom at the finish line who nobody officially asked to bring a broom but brought one anyway. They will do it again next year.
None of this runs on three founders and a vision document. It runs on people who looked at what SALTY was building and decided it was worth their Thursday evening, their weekend, their tent in a field at 2,800 metres. Not because they had to. Because something in the idea caught them and they couldn't quite put it back down.
The magazine, the races, the community: none of it exists without them. The three of us are on top of this website. Everyone else is the reason there's a website to be on. Thank you. You're all, objectively speaking, a little bit unhinged. We wouldn't have it any other way.
