Austria « havebootswilltrek.com

July 28, 2009

Sillian, still Austria (!)

Filed under: Hiking — Tags: Austria, Via Alpina, Via Alpina Red — @ 5:15 pm

I am cursed. Yesterday I got a train and bus to Untertilliach and spent six hours hiking up to Standshutzhutte (2300m). It was a stunning day: perfect weather, clear blue skies. I wanted to finish off this part of the Via Alpina by hiking along the Hoheweg and descending into Italy. All I needed was a few days of good weather like I had yesterday:

The first day of absolutely clear skies I have had on the trip so far

But no!

This morning I got up at 6:00-ish to continue the walk along the ridge to Sillianer Hutte: I figured I needed eight hours or so from where I was. Most of the day is above 2400m and it’s the final day of the Hoheweg: the most dramatic. The most scenic. The most awesome. A finale, if you like. Something to show for all the hard graft. It’s also the most exposed: there is no tree cover at all.

This morning, the day didn’t feel “right” to me: it was cold, it was cloudy and it was windy so I hung around the hut for a bit longer. Good job I did! At 7:30-ish a thunder storm started – the thunder shook the hut as it passed over us – and then a torrential hail storm that lasted for 20 minutes or so. After the worst had passed, I thought I could glimpse blue sky so I hiked up to the Sattel so I could see into Italy and all around. All I could see were more clouds on their way… so what to do?! Yesterday I had just hiked up for six hours and gained 1200m from Untertilliach to finish off this part of the Via Alpina. But I had no choice but to descend 1400m into Sillian, still on the Austrian side, or risk being caught in another storm on the ridge. The clouds were so ominous I didn’t even have the confidence to walk for three hours along the ridge and descend down the Italian side.

So right now, ironically, I am writing this on my laptop at the exact place where yesterday I had a coke before I caught a bus to Untertilliach and hiked *UP* to the ridge.

I would find it amusing if it wasn’t me.

I have been very unlucky with the weather on the Via Alpina. So far, after 24 hiking days from Razdrto, Slovenia (I will exclude the first three days which were more or less at sea level) I have had *TWO* clear, sunny days that I was confident would not end in rain or a storm. Every other day was cloudy, the views were obscured, it poured down, it thundered, it lightening’d, it hailed, or it looked like it would (nearly every day it did).

Tomorrow, I will *NOT* hike back up to the ridge and down into Italy. Sillian is at the end of the valley! I will walk *AROUND* the Hoheweg, regardless of the weather. The Hoheweg has had my attention for 10 full days and it’s time to yield. The weather has defeated me! I will hike around it so I can still claim my thru-hiking credentials (and a day of flat valley walking will be appreciated!).

Anyway, regardless of all that, the Standschutzhutte served good food but still had those glorious Schlagens. I managed to take a picture of one this time:

It’s impossible to crack off a sly one in here!

Yup. It looks like the slave ship scene off the movie L’Amistad. Even though they are convenient, well run and clean, these places do not gel well with me and I have vowed to only stay in them on an emergency basis from now on. Slovenia, at least, had bunk beds!

After the uber-day hike up Schleinitz, it has dawned on me that “staying high” along ridges in the huts is just not for me. I like hikes that start low, end up high and then descend into a valley where I can gorge myself on chocolate with wanton abandon. So I think I’ve found a few routes, certainly as far as Bolzano, that will support this across Italy. It’s not the Via Alpina but it has lots of ascent and descent. What I am looking for is something comparable with this hike across Switzerland which I have done parts of in the past: High Alpine Pass Route.

Despite my complaints about the huts and the weather, I don’t want to dwell on them or turn this blog into a tirade against them because it’s easy to fixate on such things: I won’t mention them again after this post. They are just part of the trip and something to be endured! The huts in particular are excellent: but they just aren’t for me. Infact, although I would not have said so at the time, I now have fond memories of the hike up Porezen, up steep forested hillsides in ankle-deep slush in the pouring rain. Without the weather it would have been “just another mountain” but in hindsight (lots of hindsight!) it was one of the most rewarding days of the trip.

But more on the new route when I get to Cortina where I will (if the prices are reasonable) buy a Forerunner 405 GPS Watch! They cost 350 Euros in the high street here in Austria (twice the Amazon UK price): I want one, but not THAT bad!

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July 26, 2009

On the move!

Filed under: Hiking — Tags: Austria, Hiking, Via Alpina, Via Alpina Red — @ 9:10 am

After 12 days of loafing around, eating, sleeping and doing day hikes I am finally leaving Lienz a tad fatter than when I arrived. Satisfied that I am now restocked in the blubber department, tomorrow I will get back on the train and the bus so that I can continue my thru-hike to Switzerland from the exact spot I left it. I want to do this not JUST because I have pedantic leanings (I do!) but to finish off the stunning Hoheweg (”High Route”). The next place I want to chill out for a few days is Cortina D’Ampezzo, about 5 days away, a place I’ve wanted to visit for years. Once again I will have to leave the Red Trail to get there, but I will hike through to Cortina and then engage a new plan…

I have 44 days left before I meet a friend in Lauterbrunnen and ideally I would like to hike there. BUT: If I was to follow the Red & Green Via Alpina all the way through to Lauterbrunnen I would have to hike avec backpack almost every day for the next 6 weeks. This is something I do not want to do: that would be too hard and I also enjoy loafing around campsites writing code in the sun and drinking beer A German artist here on the campsite pointed out other routes to Switzerland so after poring over maps it looks like following a portion of the Yellow Via Alpina might be just the ticket. This will take me to Bolzano from where I can take any of scores of paths into South Eastern Switzerland. The “expensive” part, apparently!

She also suggested that instead of staying in the huts everynight, I stay in the Bivuac Huts. These are huts in the Alps, open to the public, that are not serviced. I’ve passed a few along the way, usually at high altitude, so people have somewhere to shelter if the weather turns bad. To me, they looked like every other wooden cattle shed I’ve passed in the Alps but now that I’ve seen them on my map they might be worth a shot!

I didn’t realize when I arrived in Lienz how tired I was: I definitely need to work on my nutrition (and refrain from writing blog entries when the mind is fired up from a bad experience!). Although this sounds like one of those cheesy TV adverts, “I lost almost 20 pounds over 13 days doing the GR20 despite eating like the fat, gluttonous bastard I am” so I was probably in a similar state when I got to Lienz.

Next update will be in Cortina within about a week. See ya!

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July 23, 2009

Plebe-Hike: Rauchkofel. Uber-Hike: Schleinitz

Filed under: Hiking — Tags: Austria, Hiking — @ 5:57 pm

First up: Yesterday. Yesterday I hiked up Rauchkofel, a mile-high mountain that overlooks the campsite where I am staying. For the most part it was a dull plod through forest and it only opened out for the last few hours, but it gave me a chance to look across the valley and seek out other peaks to conquer.

One mile high! You cannot hike up this side.
You have to take the "Boy George" route: around, and up the back side.

What caught my attention from the summit though, in between the trees that need cut down, is Schleinitz in the distance:

Lienz at the bottom. Schleinitz at the top. An uber-day hike in waiting!

The one good thing that came out of yesterday is that the Dolomitten Hutte (which is just off the route to Rauchkofel) is well supplied by road, serves good food and would be an excellent base for hikes in the surrounding mountains. Worth noting! The last thing I expected to see whilst I was sitting in a field a few hundred metres from the Dolomitten Hutte was a red Google Earth vehicle. How random! Oh, and the paved road you emerge onto when you hike up to the Dolomitten Hutte is steep. I never, for one second, expected to see anyone cycling up it but they were. Her leg muscles can only be described as a geometric anomoly and on a hot day like today I would have given my last cent just to sniff her bicycle seat!

But today was excellent. Every day should be like this! Baking hot, clear blue skies, I hiked up from Lienz (653m) to the summit of Schleinitz (2909m).

I left at about 6:30am and arrived at the summit at 12:30-ish after six hours of relentless uphill. Oh, do I like the taste of my lungs! The first few hours up to Zettersfeld were up through forest and so the views were obscured: occasionally though, you’d end up with a panorama of Lienz like this which should probably explain why I’ve been here so long

Lienz from "Panarama Blick" on the hiking map.

On the way up, you pass the Neualplseen (two lakes):

After that, it’s more or less rocks and scrambling for the last hour or so:

You can just about make out the summit cross in the centre of the image

It looks far more intimidating than it is. It’s really quite easy. I’ve no idea what kind of rock it is but its superb for hiking: your boots just seem to “stick” to it. Assuming you stay on the marked path, most of the rocks are bedded in and only occasionally will you end up going ass over tit because one gives way under you. I took a few shots from the top but the heat haze (and my non-existent photography skills) obscured most of them so all you have is this uncropped photo with some of my day pack in Frankly, I’m embarassed!

Hiking in the fierce sun, uphill for hours on end, is satisfying. This is the kind of hiking and terrain I like. Today was a great day!

So what of the Via Alpina?! Hmmm… well, I was doing the Via Alpina to Switzerland to see the rest of the Alps before I emigrated to Australia (I’ve only really seen the Swiss Alps and I will not be back in Europe for a long time). It would also be cool, and it would make me look hard, to thru-hike to Switzerland. But I think I’ve seen far more of the Alps during the last two days than I would have on two days of the Via Alpina.

I’m giving this a lot of thought because apart from the mountain huts, the Via Alpina is really quite stunning, picks good routes across the Alps and is everything I want: the Hoheweg (high route) it followed through Austria was excellent. Physically and terrain wise, it hasn’t really been a problem so far, but carrying the extra weight *IS* hard work. But what I want from my holidays has changed over the last few years and what I really liked about trekking in North Kenya earlier this year is that you could trek until you were exhausted… and then stop, wherever that might be. The whole hut system is regimented, conjested and expensive and I think that’s what’s getting to me. This is just the nature of the beast and is something that I should have looked into first.

I’ll let you know what I decide here but at the moment I am looking at the Yellow Via Alpina and various other routes across Austria and Italy (there’s literally hundreds!) to see if any have more camping facilities along the way. For some reason, I enjoy horsing that backpack up and down mountains. It’s hard work and it’s rewarding. It’s also cool to see yourself move across countries on my Where Am I map!

See ya!

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July 18, 2009

Lienz (after 23.6 Via Alpina Red Stages)

Filed under: Hiking — Tags: Austria, Hiking, Via Alpina, Via Alpina Red — @ 7:18 pm

[Edited and Reposted so Comments were Lost!]

Fortunately the weather has been stable for the last week because every day has had a lot of exposure. Lots of passes over 2,000m, lots of climbing, lots of descending, and generally lots of effort. It’s been a hard, awesome week. This is how I wanted it to be!

When I say “stable weather” I mean “predictable”: things tend to start out clear in the morning and get cloudier as the day goes on. On this day the clouds were being brought over the peaks down into the valley… it felt like I was at the foot of a tsunami. Astounding sight!

Of course, the problem with good weather is that you want to continue hiking through every single day until the weather breaks… and that’s what I wanted to do… but a few days ago, towards the end of Stage 23, after seven consecutive days of living off mountain hut rations and tough 6-10hr days, I was exhausted so I descended into the valley and caught a bus and train to Lienz (where I am now). Coming down from hard-earned altitude is soul destroying because you know you have to regain it, but I would have needed to come down within the next few days anyhow for more Euros and the next map to take me into the Dolomites.

I was tired after seven consecutive days of hiking (almost 5km’s of ascent/descent), but earlier in the week I ran into two Belgian guys who had thru-hiked the Via Alpina from Trieste to Stage 20 in just 13 days and caught me up. RESPECT! Thinking back, there is just NO WAY I could have done that distance over that terrain in that time carrying what I’m carrying. NO WAY! So I take my hat off to them: well done! Smelling worse than Michael Jackson does right now, they descended into the valley to get their first laundry done.

Yesterday was the best day of all so I will write some bits and pieces about that. The hike from HochweissSteinHaus started with some tough snow fields to cross. There were four in all, but it’s only after this last one (the easiest!) when I’d recovered that I was in any fit state to take a picture:

To put it mildly: I am not a fan of these! I hate crossing them.

I seem to be adept at picking the hardest route across the snow. Some of the others make it look so easy! A Swiss hiker that passed me told me that my boots were too soft to “kick in” so that might be something worth looking into (she was wearing not-quite-four-season hiking boots but they looked rigid). Had there been many more of these today I would have had to turn back. It took me almost one hour to cross the four snow fields and it was HARD WORK.

Apart from that though, the day was awesome with the best weather of the entire trip so far. Here’s a few shots looking down on HochweissSteinHaus where I stayed the night before:

The thing is: it doesn’t matter how high you are, there’s always higher to go! You can (just about!) see where I stayed last night in the bottom left.

If you’re really hard you can hike/scramble up this peak which is to the right of the above photo. It’s a lot bigger than it looks!:

After the hour fighting the snow, I was finding it hard work today and then it dawned on me as I passed a Sattel whose name escapes me: I was at over 2500m! No wonder! I took a few shots into distant Italy that came out a bit dark:

I managed to take a panorama of the above photographs and I guess, if I was arty-farty, could stitch them together. But I’m not arty-farty and I’m not bothered

But all is not well! I have encountered a problem that I never anticipated. Something I had never even considered. Something that will definitely affect the rest of the trip: I do not like mountain huts. For the last month it has been OK: perhaps 10 people or so in some of the huts (or only me). Ideal! But since the holiday season started they are relentlessly JAM PACKED FULL of people. At one of the huts we passed through they were waiting for a party of FORTY to arrive. FORTY! I am used to bunkbeds because I have hostelled for years, but Schlagens (lots of mattresses placed side-by-side) really suck.

And they won’t even let you camp nearby if you have your own tent.

My main grievance though is the food. The prices are colossally high and the portions are tiny. Some of the evening meals served at certain establishments (cough – HochWeissSteinHaus – cough) contain fewer calories than my ideal, mid-morning snack! Are two small scoops of mashed potato and two small slabs of pork really an ideal meal for an end-of-day-hike?! Clearly they think so!

It takes a lot of work to get up high and when the weather is good you want to stay on the ridges and in the huts for as long as possible: but to do that I need food! I just can’t see how, carrying what I am carrying and living off mountain hut rations (and lots of extra chocolate and energy bars), I could possibly survive for more than a fortnight without wasting away (or spending a fortune). Evening those bastions of 21st century masculinity, my moobs, might even be in decline!

Having hiked along the GR20 (far harder than the Via Alpina thus far) I found the facilities superb: camping was permitted, the huts had self-catering facilities (even a sheltered cooking bench and a sink suffices) and it was possible to buy food along the way at the huts (bread, sausages, pasta, etc). The meals portions served were sufficient or good. Several of the huts there were supplied, every morning, by mule runs and the prices were reasonable. I have been disappointed and surprised so far by what is on offer in the Alpine Huts, particularly in Austria (Slovenia seemed better). I was expecting to be able to camp, at least occasionally. I do not like starting and ending my day in the mountain huts. They are overcrowded and noisy. I should have done more research before I started!

Obviously, as I am not working any more I am travelling on my savings so every time I pay 7 Euros for an apple-sized bowl of soup or 8 Euros for a breakfast (four slices of bread, coffee, a bit of marmalade) it hurts! I do not see this as good value for money… I need to think about what this means over the next few days.

I’m spending a few days in Lienz and will then go back onto the Via Alpina to get to the Dolomites… apparently, the Dolomites Rock (no pun intended!).

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