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