Hiking in the Austrian Alps

FROM the opposite end of the giant bed we were sharing, Alex’s sighs cut through the thick air, weary exhalations not unlike the eddying wind on the mountain outside.

A man on the cusp of 40, he was being tortured by small-hour worries, while around came the snores, emissions and coughing of our friends.

I heard Alex get up, fumbling his way through the dark. It was night two of a six-day hike through the high Tirol – on the Adlerweg, known as the Eagle’s Way – on what would come close to the greatest trip of all of our lives.
 
Earlier in the evening, with snow driving off the high country and the lake, the Achensee, hidden from sight below, we had arrived at a farmhouse perched on the last of the grass before the mountains turned barren. Renata, the farmer’s wife, opened the door and studied our sodden figures.

She had shown us to our room, complete with a vast bed where we would sleep seven dwarfs-style, side-by-side. Then she led us down into the heat of the kitchen where a dinner of ham, cheese and eggs awaited. Four paunchy men with thick moustaches sat eating platefuls of raw sausage. ‘They are from Germany,’ Renata told us. ‘They come here on holiday to kill our pigs.’ They were eating the raw livers of the victims.

Some months before I had sent an email to my companions, those I walk with in the Scottish Highlands, asking if anyone had wanted to hike 130km or so through the Alps. Every one of them – Alex, Alastair, Dave, Dave and Dave – said yes. So here we all were in September, at a farm called the Dalfaz Alm, six friends approaching middle age, in the heart of the high Austrian mountains.

And, there I was, listening to the wind, until Alex had returned, his sighing suggesting his troubles had grown exponentially worse. The following morning he would tell us what had happened. He had gone to the loo, but on opening the door had discovered a hefty German pig killer, naked and clearly in pain. The liver sausage seemed not to have agreed with him.

We had started out in Rattenberg, the smallest town in Austria, booking into a hotel not far from a lime-green river. We ate a dinner of soup, schnitzel and strudel, while throwing worried glances at the mountains above, before the evening dissolved all into darkness.

Come morning, the sky was icy blue. Knowing that this would be a journey through varied landscapes, we had discussed the equipment we were going to carry.

Stefan, our guide, watched us from a sun-washed step outside the hotel. Impossible to age, he was tall, angular and sinuous, for he herds rock climbers and glacier walkers, mountain toppers and skiers as well as mere hikers such as ourselves. I had been a bit sniffy about taking a guide, in that blokey ‘I know where I am going’ way. By day two I would have clung on to his leg and cried if he had tried to leave.

On that first day, we climbed. The path led through the forest, and with the growing altitude we seemed to pass through latitudes. At first, the country was reminiscent of England, with soft trees and meadows, then I was home in Scotland, pine and larch punctuated by large anthills.

The Alps, it turns out, are dotted with farms and mountain huts providing food, drink and warmth to travellers. Climbing organisations run the most isolated shelters, but the farms are real. As the snows recede in spring, stock is driven up the hill for grazing, first to the Asle, then the Alm and then to the Haut Alm. Over the centuries, the farmers have made comfortable homes for themselves at each stage. As winter approaches, they lock up and retreat back to the valleys.

We walked slowly, Stefan marking time. His gentle pace was a revelation and it made vast distances pass as if nothing. We traversed narrow paths close to vertiginous drops, with eagles turning in the thermals below, lizards flickering out of sight in front of our feet, and chamois gazing down from the cliff above.

Only once was Stefan hard with us, on that second day when we forced our way through a blizzard. Caught on the edge of a steep slope, sleet breaking down from the pass above, we struggled upwards. Patches of snow made for difficult footing. I felt the tears and snot dripping over my bitten and bloody lips.

Dave C’s rucksack cover was whipped off by the wind at the pass. As I watched Alastair run, heroically, exhaustedly, after it, I realised this was the trial we needed to push beyond our normal lives. If Stefan had not been there, we would have turned back.

For it requires effort to escape the flypaper of day-to-day life. With age, the meetings between old friends grow too brief. In the Alps, we found the opportunity to talk in rambling and episodic conversations.

We dropped down to the Achensee, crossed by boat in the sunshine, then climbed again into the lonely snowy heights. Stefan told us tales of growing up in the mountains, of the whispered-of monsters which kept small boys in control as they summered in the high wide spaces. The Waldschnagge was prime among them, the people-stealer, who would get you if you stayed out after dark. At the end of each day there were the huts, kitchens alive with stews and bread, guitars and cards, and, ultimately, the rich air of wood-panelled dormitories.

Every morning brought a heartbreaking view. The Lamsenjoch Hutte, a bleak affair high in the cliffs, offered sight of the following day’s traverse, with a drop below of more than 300 metres. As we headed on to it come the morning, cresting a ridge and so freed from this terror, we entered the sublime. In front of us was the Laliderer Wande, a 900-metre limestone wall that would accompany us for three days, a climber’s dream but this late in the season patched with ice and snow.

Stefan left us at the bottom of a valley, in the warm air among a stand of 600-year-old sycamores. ‘The path is clear now,’ he said. ‘You can find your way.’ There are only a few hundred guides in the whole of the Alps and he is a prince among them. Still, it’s important to break free, so we struck out on our own.
 
Freedom saw us dawdle a little, pausing to peer at the small jewels of mountain flowers or take ludicrous photographs. We picnicked, watched by ravens, and laughed, mocked and gambolled. ‘There’s the perfect example of a drumlin field,’ said Dave C, having studied geology. ‘And there’s a truly amazing catastrophic flow.’ This seems to be the glacial equivalent of what happened to the pig killer.