Day 20 - To Tyrol at the St.Pöltner Hütte

After a very chilly night, we woke up in a fighting spirit at 0800 to do our most challenging (and gorgeous) hike ever. We had noticed in the past that we were not eating enough for breakfast so we packed up some bacon & scrambled eggs while we drove through Zell Am See so we would have a hearty breakfast and tons of energy. What we did not know is that, in Austria, you can buy eggs that are already hard boiled...

So the bacon & scrambled egg plan had to be adjusted. We were out of the van by 0930 after i finally managed to finish the last few pages of my book (John Grisham - Sycamore Row 3/5 stars). There are two ways to go from the Hintersee mountain lake to the St Poltner Hutte. A red hike and a black hike, the rankings are pretty much the same as what goes in skiing, the black ones sometimes involve some 'via ferrata' type of things. Aliona felt more confident to go on the red one so on we went, it was a steep first couple of kms but we were still fresh. We climbed up to the tree lines were the vegetation stop being subalpine and start being alpine, with shorter/smaller shrubs and plants. We started at 1,300m so we probably were at around 1,600m then.

At that point we found an abandoned farm and heard a deafening scream from one of those little things.

Groundhogs (we will from now on use the french word of Marmotte because it's cuter), Marmottes as I was saying are the cutest. They fled, typical prey behaviour, as they heard/saw/smelled us arrive. so we decided to stay idle and see if they would come out after we stayed idle for a while and they did. They're little balls of fur, I would venture to call them our favourite rodents. we kept going and picked up the pace as the path plateaued a bit and enjoyed the incredible sights that were offered to us.

We found what looked to be a ranger refuge at around 1,700m. I made a mental note: If I ever have to disappear, this is where I will be.

We kept going after peaking into the path of the water fall and got up to the tarn of Plattachsee, we decided to stop there for lunch, It was nice. The weather was getting a bit chilly so we started putting additional layers.

With altitude the vegetation changes significantly and for some odd reason, flowers get more beautiful. Maybe because they only live a short life, in any case, it's always a delight.

We reach the St Poltner Hutte (2,481m) by 1400 and decided to stop for a beer,  funny enough, a beer at roughly 2500m is still 30% cheaper than a beer in Paris.... The hutte is super cute, and warm and you can potentially spend the night there to go higher the next days. There's a path going to a summit at 2,900 and another few paths that lead to other huttes, I reckon you could spend a week going from hutte to hutte without ever going down the mountains.

We took a picture near the bell & rang the bell as we were coming down. The temperature was 10°C so we were happy to have carried our jackets and warm gear all the way up.

We decided to take the black path on the way down since the red one had been a bit tedious on the way up (a few km of narrow track surrounded by cow manure & trees). I found a 3D map of this specific trail. Essentially the last bit is where it gets really steep and you have a couple of ladders and ropes to hold on to.

The path down was great, the views incredible and we weren't even that tired! Seems like our training is starting to show. Altogether we did 14km and 1,260m of elevation gain. We are now pretty convinced that Austria rules.

We got home at around 1830, warmed up some goulash (courtesy of Nina) and slept like a couple of stones.

Next day, We head to Zürich, to see Giang & Steph and to enjoy the Zürich open air festival and fulfill a childhood dream of seeing Pendulum.