Day 7: Hall in Tirol to Mieders
We knew early on in our planning that we wanted to stay outside of Innsbruck. To get us out of Hall, I plotted a route that paralleled the A13 Brenner Autobahn while striving to keep some distance from it, holding the overall length to what we hoped would be a manageable 12 miles. S and I both expected it to be an ugly hike, given the nearby freeway. Yet once we got beyond a heavily industrial stretch near the beginning, it turned out to be a surprisingly pleasant day.
We followed the Inn out of Hall. The closest we got to Innsbruck was passing by the Olympic Village east of town, before crossing the river.
I took no photos of the big trucks, parking lots, loading docks, gas stations, warehouses, Ikeas (plural!), freeway, etc. that we passed through before we escaped up a hill to Schlosspark Ambras, with its quiet landscaped 18th-c. English-style gardens. Parts of the castle date to the 13th and 14th centuries; Archduke Ferdinand II Renaissancified (is that a word?) the castle in the mid-16th century.
The Schloss:
The piercing calls of a peacock alerted us to some snazzy feather-rattling strutting.
From Ambras, we continued uphill, crossing several times over switch-backing tracks of what we suspect is a defunct tourist train.
From the hills over Ambras, we eventually descended to an underpass through which we crossed the freeway. En route, a giant metal ring showing the size of the tunnel currently being built through the mountains along the Brenner Pass. The Brenner Base Tunnel, once completed in est. 2032, will be 55km long. We often saw evidence of construction--e.g. temporary worker housing units, temporary construction buildings, etc.--along our route this day and the next.
The pleasant surprise for us was that much of the time, our route was separated from the nearby Autobahn by a combination of elevation differences and intervening ridges on the hills where we were walking. Consequently, we enjoyed a pretty quiet day.
S appreciated that the Reise Büro (i.e. yours truly) had us pass through this train stop:
This bridge over the Sill River was built over a big pipe. It was a little unnerving for this acrophobe, but entirely manageable. I crossed quickly; S lingered.
On this road, important things happened related to Ambras, Matrei, and Veldidena, but my Latin isn't good enough to know what.
Also, Pope Pius VI slept here in 1782.
Just up the road from the Latin history, Mickey Mouse and several of his plucky friends were trapped in suspended glass cages, like flies in amber, perhaps as a deterrent to other trademarked plastic animals.
My cellphone camera does not show depth well at all. I took this photo to show the dramatically steep hillside that someone wielding a scythe had to deal with to cut the grass.
We made a short detour to see the Europa Bridge from afar...
...but the rest of our hike was along a peaceful, mostly wooded trail on the the opposite side of the ridge from the Autobahn.
Bark beetles have been wreaking havoc on the spruce trees here--one of the impacts of climate change.
At last, Mieders--our destination for the day.
With our legs still recalling the previous day's descent, our evening walk consisted of finding pizza, then climbing up to Mieders' tiny-chapel-on-a-hill, because it was available to climb to and on the way back to our hotel.
Like most tiny-chapel-on-a-hills, this one offered a bench and fine views.
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Ta da! 15.1 miles walked, ~2,490 ft elevation gain.
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