Climbing a mountain with bits of metal stuck to it

This blog post concerns a hiking/climbing trip I took up the Rax with Steve, an old scouting friend of mine. Although when I lived in London it would somehow have never come into my head to travel one and a half hours by train starting at 7.30am to reach a mountain, that's the sort of thing I do nowadays. Of course, it helps a lot that the mountain in question is 2000m high and offers a series of opportunities to scramble up or along its steeper parts while attached to some wires which are in turn attached to the rock.

Such an assisted scrambling route is known in english by its Italian name, via ferrata (iron way I'm guessing), and is in german called a Klettersteig, which interestingly involves two different words for climb, one being in the sense of rock climbing and the other in the sense of climbing stairs/a ladder/up anything.

Steve models the slightly too small helmet I hired for him (sorry Steve!)

I bought the required equipment for the Klettersteig last year, a helmet and a pair of clips that attach to your harness which will be familiar to anyone who has ever done any kind of high ropes course as they are basically the same. These are not supposed to be routinely fallen upon (unlike in climbing, where you can give up and fall onto the rope any time you like), they are just there to stop you falling off the mountain if you do something really silly.

Our route, the right hand Steig then the upper traverse.

 A lot of the time, a via ferrata is something that in the UK we wouldn't even put any protection on, so it isn't all that dangerous, but the addition of ladders etc means it can get you to and up some really cool bits of the mountains where walking wouldn't work, without requiring you to spend a whole day flat out climbing a rockface, which requires a lot more specialist skills.

View from the top of the Klettersteig!

The Klettersteig was excellent, the valley in which it is located is surrounded on all 3 sides by very steep walls of limestone, and the second part of the via ferrata was a traverse across the back wall, affording excellent views down the whole length of the spectacular valley. Having reached the top we spent a couple of hours exploring the undulating Rax plateau, a very different looking landscape to the sharply plunging cliffs that form the edge of this big chunk of limestone.

Alpine flowers were everywhere on the plateau

After a refreshing Almdudler and an expensive trip in the cable car to save us breaking our knees for no reason getting back down to the road, we called it an exhausting but thoroughly worthwile day!

The selected photographic highlights are located beyond this link!

Der Tom

Trip to Burgenland

In the second week of July I was privileged enough to be invited along with my housemate to the homeland of my other housemate, who has recently left us to return to that magical land. I have a couple of friends in the area and my housemate had sure spent a lot of time there, so I was curious to check out what made the area so great! The area in question being Burgenland, a reasonably narrow but long strip of a Bundesland which divides the rest of Austria from Hungary and contains Austria's largest lake.

Burgenland is really very close to Vienna, an hour on the train but only maybe 50 km, the train is just quite slow and winds around a lot.We breakfasted at the parents' of another friend, and it was here I was first introduced to one of the coolest things about Burgenland, at least at this time of year: there is food growing EVERYWHERE. I barely had a single fruit or vegetable that had not been grown in the garden or field of the person I was being served it by...

Schloss Esterhazy has some crazy faces on the wall...

Then it was off to examine the main town in the area, Eisenstadt. It is certainly no Vienna in size, but it does have a cool Schloss (Esterhazy) in the middle of it. Having taken the tour and soaked up some grandeur in the Schloss (where Haydn spent a lot of his time as musician in residence), we headed up the hill to one of the oddest churches I have ever visited, a 'Bergkirche'. Basically it contains all the stations of the cross (plus some extra stations they added for extra fun!) inside an artificial, dome shaped rambling building of rough stone. The path winds up, down, in and around and round every corner is another biblical tableaux, until at some point you reach the top and can enjoy the view. Apparently (according to german wikipedia at least) these things weren't so unusual in the 18th century.

The Neusiedlersee and some inhabitants.

Other activities that day included checking out the famous Neusiedlersee, a 36 km long and 6-12 km wide but very shallow (< 2 m) lake surrounded by thick reedbeds and beloved by austrians, holidaymakers and waterbirds alike. In the evening I took my first ever trip to Hungary to eat some Hekk, which appears to be a delicious pike type fish in batter that frankly wasn't too far off a posh british fish and chips! It comes with garlic bread, not chips however.

What Hekk looks like, though mine had no chips!

The following day saw more hanging out by the lake and a trip to the picturesque town of Rust, which is absolutely full of stork nests, perched on little artificial platforms above the chimney. Previous to that occurred the best wildlife sighting of the weekend, when on a visit to a low hill above a large roman quarry (now used for a big opera festival) we were privileged enough to see a Ziesel, or European Ground Squirrel. Not a common thing by any means! The hill by itself was rather cool, it was littered with abstract sculpture left over from a sculptors international conference in the 70s, which gave it a real Salvador Dali air, what with the weird forms intruding on the rolling landscape.

Sculpture park/ Ziesel habitat

We finished off our trip by picking some fresh apricots and courgettes to take back with us. So there you have it, Burgenland, hot, flat, and full of fruit and veg! Oh, and one huge lake and some storks! And lots of people who very much enjoy living there to take advantage of these things...

Have a quick look at the highlights by clicking the green words!

Der Tom

Schneeberg, 2061 m

It's summer! Things have stopped flooding! It doesn't rain, even when you really, really want it to! When it is summer, you can climb mountains because they are not covered in snow anymore!

Later in the summer I had agreed to go on a 3 day hike in the Alps with some friends. As at least one of these friends runs constantly and has done at least two marathons, I figured it wouldn't hurt to put in a bit of training and get up on some mountains for the month beforehand. Obviously, I also just really, really love mountains.



Today's post and photos concern a hike I did with a couple of Vorarlbergers up the Schneeberg, highest mountain in lower austria and easternmost peak of the alps over 2000 m in elevation. The hike started in drizzle but this quickly evaporated as we walked up the winding track next to the railway which leads up to the plateau near the peak. The railway is pretty cool actually, and it certainly demonstrates how tricky it is for trains to go up steep hills. Once a day on weekends they send the old time steam train up, and it takes 1.5 hours for a climb of 1200 metres! We saw it, and it was a pretty noisy thing. The engine was placed at the back of the train, possibly more to save the passengers from the immense gouts of steam/smoke it was pumping out than anything else... I know there must be a lot of kids that are pretty sure that train is the coolest thing ever though!

 
Once over the lip of the plateau at 1800 m or so it became clear that the sky might have been blue and the sun beaming, but the weather was still not ideal. The wind was about the strongest I have ever experienced on a mountain, and when walking across it you really did have to walk diagonally leaning into it, and it could hold you up! Thankfully, the wind was not evenly distributed over the mountain so we soldiered on to the top, to be greeted with incredible views, reaching even to a faint Vienna in the distance over 60 kilometres away!

Heading down a much steeper and rockier section, we finally reached the bottom of the mountain having done 1500 m up, 1300 m down, and nigh on 20 km horizontal distance! Getting up for work the next day was NOT easy, I can tell you.

Here's some visual highlights!

Der Tom

Wasserleitungsweg part 2: The Wasserleitungsweg strikes back

As I mentioned in my first post about the amazing series of tubes that bring water to Vienna, the Wasserleitung travels all the way up into the mountains. Along with a large group of mostly russian and bulgarian speaking companions (english very much not the majority language on that hike!) who all wanted a nice Sunday stroll, a month or so ago I set out to walk to the source of one of the big pipes that ensure we have tasty water to drink in the city. It's an easy hike, following the valley cutting through the mountains, rather than going up any off the limestone giants themselves. As most of the hike was along the valley floor, I haven't got too many photos to show you that I think are that impressive. But I did experiment a bit with some long exposures to capture the cool wide mountain stream we encountered further up.

 This stream was obviously textbook habitat for a bird that is rather elusive in Britain, the dipper. I found a whole nest of these interesting streambirds, which like to dive messily in and out of fast flowing streams, and are apparently unimaginatively called 'Wasseramsel' or 'Water-blackbirds' in German. I was very excited to see one, on family holidays in the UK we were always being told that 'there might be dippers about' but I cannot once recall actually seeing one. After getting used to the idea that these birds are mostly invisible, it is a little puzzling to have several of them hopping and flying around with noisy abandon next to one's seat on the pebbles of the riverbed!

A dipper! Top left.

Here's the tiny collection of pictures in full!

Der Tom