Late summer trip to the Grossvenediger
Due to our journey to Singapore, Taiwan and Borneo, we really did not experience any summer at home. Having the fantastic summer of 2018 in mind, with the epic crossing of the Alps, we decided to jump on a trip to Munich. It was end of August, and the weather forecast was perfect, so nothing was standing in the way of a high-alpine adventure.
We targeted the Grossvenediger, the county highpoint of the Salzburg county, and the fourth-highest mountain of Austria. And as the first ascenders did, we would climb from the North – a longer, but more rewarding approach. A taxi transported us to the trailhead deep into the Obersulzbachtal. Since the Grossvenediger is loaded with glaciers, and it was the end of the summer, we expected many weak snow bridges over the crevasses, so we decided to join a guided group of eight people.
Arriving late from the airport, our group had already left, so we enjoyed the undisturbed ascent to the Kürsinger Hütte, where we would stay for the night. Here we also met our group: everything from no experience at all to super-fit, so this could be an interesting day tomorrow, we thought.
And it was.. getting all eight people to move at the same pace was challenging, now and then someone tipped over their crampons and fell, everybody had needs for different things such as rest, food and toilets at different times. Dad contributed to the mess by getting cramps…some dextrose saved his (and our) day. But our guide Manfred did a great job and managed to get the whole team at the summit. On the way down two of our group broke through thin snow bridges, but were held back by the rope – which showed us that is was the right decision to join a group, even though we were missing the freedom feeling we usually have in the mountains.
But that was forgotten when I was sitting in the sunshine at the lovely Gasthof Siggen, drinking an Ice Coffee as a starter, waiting for my “Pinzgauer Kasnockn” main course!
