Scenic railway antics: The Oetschergraben

Today's blog concerns a walk along some deep limestone gorges near the border of Lower Austria and Styria, chief among them the Oetschergraben. This walk was a last hurrah for one of my longtime hiking companions who is now moving to Switzerland. It isn't incredibly far from Vienna but it took a long while to get to. Luckily, getting there is part of the fun of the trip, as our destination was reached via a 2 hour journey on a scenic narrow gauge railway (stretching between St. Poelten and the pilgrim's destination of Mariazell). The train was all very modern, as this is one of the few electrified narrow gauge railways in existence (train facts!). There was certainly a lot of switchbacking, and we could see certain stations on our route for a very long time after we had left them as we were just zigzagging up rather than going anywhere. A lot of the way was pretty shrouded in trees, but there were frequent brief glimpses of mountains, including towards the end the 1800 m Oetscher itself.

Once alighting from the train we began our leisurely journey into the various limestone gorges the area has to offer. Water levels in the streams were low at first but as we got deeper in there was soon a fair amount of rushing clear water, looking quite blue occasionally against the white-grey limestone. Most of the views were along the gorge to far off cliffs or up to the nearer walls, where the limestone had weathered into pinnacles with little bits of vegetation on top, merging with steeper cliffs.

I spent a lot of the walk entranced because it was very clear by the dead straight nature of the gorge and some telltale planes of smashed up limestone (fault gouge or 'cataclasite') visible in the stream bed that we were following a large fault core with some very nice exposures of the crushed up fault rocks. Everyone else was far more impressed by the massive caterpillar we found though (details in the photo gallery!)

 An unstrenuous but beautiful walk in pleasantly cool summer weather completed, we headed for home. Stopping briefly to change trains in a sleepy hamlet by the narrow gauge railway allowed me to spot a cigarette machine that was a relic from the days of the austrian Schilling! This wasn't that surprising once one saw the interior of the nearby Gasthaus however... Just as we got back on a train the real storms started, and we then had to disembark again and change over to buses as lightening had taken out the power in a later stretch of the line. The scenic journey did begin to drag after it took nearly 3 hours to get back even to the mainline to head home, but looking at the photos now I'd say it was worth it!

Hope you enjoy the photos from the trip, and see you next time!

Der Tom

The Heukuppe

Summer marches on in all its sweltering-but-not-as-bad-as-last-year glory. I have decamped to Britain for August, hoping to avoid the last and hottest month of true summer in Austria. From there I bring you this set of images from a hike near the end of July.

This hike was directly inspired by the previous one I blogged about, as we realised that from the same point we ended that hike we could start and head up to the highest point on the Rax plateau, the Heukuppe (2007m). This isn't a hugely important peak, but as it is awkwardly located I had never climbed it and claimed the Rax plateau entirely as my own, as it were. The date was fixed by other commitments so it was lucky that the weather cooperated, delivering a cool, cloudy but pleasant day for the walk. In fact throughout the day it rained pretty much everywhere we could see from our vantage point, just not on us!

A relatively overgrown path led along the base of the steep slopes / cliffst that surround most chunks of limestone in the alps, until we eventually clambered our way up a steep gully and made it onto the rolling, green, wildflower covered top. From there a quick hike up to the peak, then a leisurely descent facing onto fantastic views over the whole plateau, via many switchbacks on the 'Schlangenweg' (snake path) and back to the car.

Throughout much of the hike the clouds were just low enough to be at or around the heights of the peaks, alternately obscuring and unveiling different views as the wind blew and adding some dramatic grey-blue-white backdrops to the views.

Enjoy the small gallery of pictures!

Der Tom