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.
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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 t
he 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
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