Day 16 – Mödlinger Hütte to Admont + Rest Day

Daily Distance – 14km
Daily Ascent – 450m
Daily Descent – 1150m
Total Distance – 239km
Distance Remaining – 774km

When passing through each town, hut or mountain range on this walk, I am trying to keep in mind that in all probability I will never again return. For this reason, I am glad to have a rest day in Admont, both to enjoy this peaceful and green town, but also to reflect on having reached the end point of my journey along the North Alpine Way.

Before planning this walk, I had never heard of Admont and ended up here only because it happens to be the first intersection point between the westbound North Alpine Way and the Via Alpina Purple wending its way up from Slovenia. I find it easy to forget when planning a route based on factors of distances, grocery availability, elevation gain and so on, that these two dimensional places picked on a map are actually real places, with distinct characters and people who live there. If it hadn’t been for wanting to practice my German (and Vienna being much easier to reach by train), rather than learning Slovenian, today would just be another day and town on tour, instead of a significant milestone on the journey to Bregenz.

Impressions of the North Alpine Way (Nordalpenweg)

I am finding it difficult to summarise the walk so far in any cogent order, so I will throw out a few bullet points and hope for the best:

• It can be a pain booking accommodation, with sometimes only single huts available for long stretches and a prohibition on camping for almost all of the route. Having said that, many huts had lots of free space, with only occasional, typically geographically isolated, huts being fully booked. The concern being that if a hut is full, it’s usually in the middle of a national park, where the overnight wild camping fines can be quite high (if caught).
• Tent campers are not particularly welcome in Austria. There has not been a single campsite en-route, but several places in towns where people can pay a nominal fee for overnight parking of their motorhomes with water and electricity hookups.
• Because every night is spent in a hut, where consuming your own food is a little frowned upon, but drinking plenty of beer is happily encouraged, this is not a cheap trail to walk. Accommodation fee, dinner and a few drinks can run to the tune of nearly €50 per night. Town accommodation is, of course, still more expensive.
• During these two and a half weeks, I have used my tarpaulin twice and my tent once. Not great usage given how much extra equipment is required (e.g. sleeping mat, sleeping bag), but I wouldn’t be without the extra reassurance that I will always have shelter for the night.
• At least during the section that I have walked, the trail feels really quiet. Contrary to my complaints about the overpopulated Tour du Mont Blanc, it has been rather a novelty to meet other people walking during the day other than on the weekends. This does mean that there has been no trail community to while away evenings with, but one can’t have things both ways. The feeling of having the mountains almost to myself some days has been nice.
• Nordalpenweg does not believe in easy introductions. Pretty good fitness is required from the start to avoid a very painful acclimatisation. Maybe by Austrian standards the entire walk is relatively easy, in which case we should study their genome to see if the entire population is actually part mountain goat.
• I find it difficult to tell if my fitness has improved as trail conditions, particularly the heat are constantly changing. Steep ascents on hot days still ruin me, but otherwise I think have improved. With all the snack bars and beer I may have actually gained weight though.
• The path quality and signage has been generally excellent. The times when the trail was of poorer quality (e.g. overgrown, poor signage) have really stuck out because of their rarity.
• On the way to Admont I walked a trail which a sign informed me had been badly damaged by high water levels and that entry was at one’s own risk. At times such as that I was grateful to my education on the trails of New Zealand. “Badly damaged, enter at own risk”, in Europe, is pretty much just par for the course on a kiwi tramping track. Being able to tackle these sections having already walked worse is a real stress relief.
• Forestry is real big business in Austria. At least in the east of the country, it seems as if forest is everywhere, and everywhere it is being harvested for timber. I am not familiar with the native trees of Austria, but given that I have almost exclusively walked in pine forests, I suspect at least some of these sections were plantations, grown especially for the purpose of providing quick returns.
• Communication has generally been no issue for me, or at least, no worse than at home in Germany. Some of this, it should be noted, is that the Austrians were good enough to speak standard German with me rather than the local dialect, which they use among themselves. Perhaps I am also fortunate in that, as a learner of the German language, everything sounds strange to me normally. I wonder if having far less of a fixed idea of how German words should sound, compared to a native speaker, is a benefit when understanding people speaking the language with a different accent. I met the first two hikers who will be walking the Via Alpina Route with me yesterday evening, who were bemoaning how difficult communication has been on their hike up from Slovenia. On reflection, I have not seen a single menu translated into English so far. It would seem menu translation may be my new trail superpower.
• Scenically, many sections were nice, very few poor and some were as fine as I have seen anywhere in the world. Accommodation niggles aside, I have been really impressed by Austria so far.