Day 28 – nr Erichhütte to Maria Alm

Daily Distance – 17km
Daily Ascent – 425m
Daily Descent – 1160m
Total Distance – 425km
Distance Remaining – 554km

If I were to give a title to this section of the walk it would be “bullshit, barbed wire and river crossings”. I have no idea why, but on several occasions today rusted barbed wire fences had been erected across the path with no stile. The only solution being to try and find a low spot, throw a leg up onto a fence pole and hop over. The risk of Tetanus at 8am is an effective, albeit unpleasant, wake up method. Especially energising given the alliance between the rain slick ground and the copious cow faeces making footings treacherous.

My bivouac experience last night was not entirely smooth. Rain was not predicted, but duly arrived in concert with thunder, lightning, and most importantly rain in my face. Not expecting wind or rain, I had pitched the ridge line of my bivouac a reasonably high in order to maximize head room. Unfortunately, this allowed the wind blown rain a direct path to my face, a situation rather less than conducive to sleep. Still only 22:30, although already pitch dark, I had to scramble out into the rain, lower the trekking pole to prevent rain ingress, adjust peg points to re-tighten the fabric before wriggling back inside with the grace and desperation of a worm escaping a hungry bird. Rain problem solved, I amused myself by counting the seconds between lightning and thunder, which, even by my irregular counting, confirmed that the storm was neither particularly close, nor coming closer. Fortunately, once the storm had quietened a little, I did manage to sleep again, although was less than impressed to find that my somewhat less than reliable trekking pole had slipped to an even shorter height overnight, which allowed large pools of water to form on the walls of my shelter. Fortunately, other than making my shelter rather narrow, this proved no issue and overall I learnt a lot about tarp camping from the experience.

Aside from fence jumping and scrambling up and down water eroded banks for a few rain-swollen river crossings, I took the opportunity to stop at every food/drink source on route. A kindly old gentlemen whose reply to “is it too early to order coffee?”, was “it’s never too early for coffee”, even showed me his stuffed Marmot having heard one calling in the distance. On balance, I think I prefer the unstuffed version, but he had a very cute, and happily unstuffed, kitten, plus coffee, so forgiveness was easy to find.

Tonight I sleep under a solid roof again in the ski resort town of Maria Alm. It clearly reveals itself to be a tourist town by featuring; a huge number of hotels, ski shops round every corner, and even more damningly a supermarket that opens…on a Sunday! Speaking of which, it is a relatively low end supermarket chain and yet had no fewer than five varieties of caviar waiting for impulse purchase in chill cabinets on the way to the checkout. Clearly nothing says apres-hike more than salty fish eggs. How the non-smelly hiker types live!