'Last good hiking weekend of the autumn' mark 3...

By the time this hike (officially in November!) came around, it was the third weekend of gorgeous sunny mountain weather in a row. Every time we had rushed out to the hills to make the most of our 'last chance'. This hike represents last chance number three! Gorgeous sunshine at the beginning of November.

This week's hike featured an uncommon piece of technology, the automobile! Although I try to  hike via public transport as much as possible, there are some places it's just not really possible to hike from/to without a car, and I am grateful I also have hiking friends who own this piece of equipment. This hike was up onto a mountain I had never ever been to before, which for an Alp less than 1.5 hours drive from Vienna is quite unusual, and very exciting! The Schneealpe is a large 1700m limestone plateau with some 1900m peaks, situated just a bit west of the Rax plateau. It isn't as popular as the Rax or Schneeberg due to it not being situated directly on a trainline. It is also famed for fierce winds across its flat summit plateau, its highest point is called the Windberg (you guys can translate that for yourseves I hope).

Of course, this year is a charmed hiking year and no such freezing wind was in evidence. We climbed rapidly up to the plateau, passing beautiful bright yellow autumn trees and big sheer limestone cliffs, which showed off some lovely folding in the slanting November sunlight. After the exhausting but short ascent, we reached the plateau itself. There was a quite reasonable amount of snow already, but the sun was so strong that only t-shirts were required. The tiger-striping of partially melted snow added dramatic contrast to the already dramatic landscape, and we headed eagerly across the plain to our destination.

Slipping and sliding a bit on the snowfields we soon reached the peak of the Windberg at 1900m. Because the Schneealpe is set away from the other nearby massifs and the Windberg projects on its own, the summit offers stunning views off in every direction. Far below the fog/low cloud that filled the valleys was visible all around, lending a decidedly mysterious air to the more distant peaks. Closer, the cliffs and pinnacles of the neighbouring Rax plateau were thrown into sharp relief by the bright sun in the absolutely clear mountain air.

We chose to take a long and winding route home, which took us along a fantastic teetering ridge walk down to a pass between two valleys, then along the rapidly darkening valley and back to the car about 15 minutes after sundown. An absolutely amazing walk! Partly because of the weather, but also because the Schneealpe is really a fantastic mountain! I hope to go there again, although I am aware the weather may not always be the same...

Pictures at the link as usual!

bis bald,
der Tom

Autumn in the mist

Somewhat unbelievably, the weekend following the previously reported incredibly sunny autumn hike was forecast to be equally lovely. Feeling more fit than a few weeks before, I immediately sought out the crumpled piece of paper where I had planned several hikes and picked out the one I had formerly felt was too long: Spital am Semmering to the Stuhleck (1785m, 1100m height gain) and then down to Muerzzuschlag (19km measured on the map). A few years ago I climbed the Stuhleck on a slightly unsatisfactory route which involved far too much ski piste, and while at the summit caught sight of a beautiful curving ridge walk. Not knowing where it went at the time, I filed it away for another day. 2 years later, that day finally came!

And what a day! Once again, Vienna was a foggy mess but the sun was really beaming by the time we neared the Alps. Our joy was short lived as we entered the valley near Muerzzuschlag however, as the sun disappeared under a low cloud blanket. All we could hope was that it wouldn't reach all the way to the peak... The start of the hike took us straight into the clouds, through pine forest dripping with condensation and muffled in fog. As we climbed higher in the slightly eerie stillness, something wonderful began to happen. The cloud began to thin out, but the air was still filled with water droplets.

The sun began to be visible as a bright disk in the mist, and the whole effect was like the most incredible smoke machine and lighting combo you ever saw! The bright sun sent thick and thin shafts of light spearing down through the small gaps in the branches of the conifers. Light beams and shadows became something three dimensional and solid, hanging in the air and remaining fixed to the sun as one moved one's head to take it all in. Moving up through the cloud we were treated to maybe 15 or 20 minutes of this spectacle, changing all the time as the density of the cloud changed. I have literally never seen anything like it.

Once above the cloud we had another spectacle to admire, the valley below filled with a veritable river of cloud. As the day wore on we made it to the top of Stuhleck in good spirits, sitting down to lunch to overlook the hazy mountains in the distance. The clouds in the valleys had thinned, but there was still a line of haze bisecting the blue peaks in the distance. We curved down the wide ridge drenched in sunshine, and after an undulating ridge walk headed down towards the valley past towering wind turbines. The sun was sinking as we got to the valley floor, lighting up the autumn leaves with yet more colour.

We arrived at the train station rather tired, having covered 24km according to the GPS! After a bit of a look round the exhibition about the new tunnel being built in the area (ooh, 3D geology!) we caught the train home for a well deserved meal in a Bulgarian restaurant then bed...

The photos can't quite do the clouds justice, but they still came out really well, please do have a look and check out some of the hi-res versions too!

Bis bald,

der Tom

Autumn in the sun...

I have been organising pretty much weekly hikes recently. Blog land hasn't seen much evidence of this as the more photos I take, the longer it takes for me to sit down and sort out the ones I like. Also, some weeks its just overcast and grey. This doesn't really spoil the hike in the slightest, or even the views, but it makes for a rubbish photo nonetheless.

Anyway, this hike was chosen specifically due to the weather report. We have had an utterly ridiculous heatwave here that has meant that for 2 weeks in a row mid-october temperatures were nudging up over 20 degrees, and there has been plenty of sun. In the Vienna basin though, autumn is the season of low cloud/fog. It is very common that all of the lowlands are shrouded in miserable fog all day while up abouve 300m the sun beams.

Just such an occurrence was forecast for the Saturday for which I planned this latest hike to the Sonnwendstein (1521m), which has an excellent view over the Vienna basin and is ideal for watching this phenomenon in its full glory. We took a new, longer and more winding route to the summit, prolonging the hike to at least 18km and taking us past the gorgeous autumn foliage. Every so often out of the dark of the conifers you would catch sight of the fiery yellow-orange of solitary deciduous trees. The photos get close, but can't quite get across the sheer intensity of the colours...

Several times during the climb and most spectacularly at the summit (after a well-deserved Gasthaus lunch) the sea of clouds over the plains was visible. You could easily imagine yourself atop some floating island... And chuckle at the misfortune of your Vienna-bound companions while soaking in the constant beaming sunshine! A beautiful curving ridge walk with stunning panoramic views of the Rax and Schneeberg massifs rounded off the hike before a rapid descent in order to catch the train on time.

I hope you enjoy this very autumnal gallery of photos, with the added benefit of some serious cloud-sea action!

Bis bald,

Der Tom

Autumn is on its way!

Herr, es ist Zeit, begins the Rilke poem. Well, I'm not quite sure it is officially autumn time for a while yet, but you can certainly feel that it is going to come creeping up soon enough! Perhaps because I spent the whole of August hiding from the heat of Austria in (actually pretty sunny) London and Glasgow, August for those who remained behind was wet and cool. If by cool you mean not over 28 degrees most of the time, of course. All that wetness seems to have given the mushroom life of the mountains a great kickstart though! On my most recent hike the fungi were already in full 'bloom'...

It was a misty day as we started off on the 18 km hike I had invented after an evening's pleasant route planning the week before. This was a huge photographic blessing, as the webs which carpeted the undergrowth everywhere were festooned with water droplets, lending everything an exciting silvery sheen and allowing for some great close ups. As we headed further up more and more of the low bushes were blueberries, and the higher we went the more heavily laden their stubby branches. We stopped frequently to rake the berries off the plants in handfuls, turning our tongues blue and our hands a garish purple from all the juice. Now and again we supplemented our blueberry diet with some raspberries which were also found hanging around in the less wooded spots.

Later into the hike the sun burned though the clouds and it ended up being a wonderful day, although the views down the valley were almost completely obscured in haze. The order of the day really was colour, to the intenese purple of blueberry juice and the mild pinkish-red of the raspberries should be added the deep green of the blueberry leaves, the fiery orange of the stags-horn-like fungi and the spotted red and white of quite a few fly agaric.

I wasn't really in shape after a month of sitting around, but a great hike nonetheless. Sometimes things just seem to work out and a whole bunch of cool photos appear by chance all at once. Check them out here!

Bis bald,

Der Tom

Vienna is beautiful

It's not that you forget that the city is beautiful. You don't stop noticing it so much as you forget that not everywhere else looks like it. The picture that springs to mind when you think 'street' becomes something very different from what it used to be. The same with 'park', and many other things. The best thing to counteract this sort of effect is of course travel. You can go somewhere else, then come back and see your city anew. Or you can fly in people from elsewhere, and vicariously enjoy their reactions to things that have become familiar.

Sometimes, nobody even has to travel in real life at all. Seeing your city in a film is a little bit of both, looking at it through new eyes and watching the reactions of others, all wrapped up together. Recently, having known of it for a very long time, I finally got around to watching the film Before Sunrise, probably already on its way to getting called a 'classic'. A great film for many reasons that I won't go into here. One of the things it succeeded at, and the thing that drew me to the film in the first place, is its treatment of its setting, the city of Vienna. It really succeeds in showing off the best of many parts of the city, and it has helped jog me out of my complacency almost as well as a visit from a real person might.

So here are a very few photos from around Vienna in the last few months, to celebrate the fact that once the film had finished, the whole city of Vienna was still waiting for me outside the door!

Bis bald,

der Tom

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