Our Durham friend C' flew to Germany to attend a Taylor Swift concert in Hamburg with her daughter. Lucky her! And lucky us, because afterward she took a train south to hike from Lenggries to Brannenburg with me; S joined us for the first two days.
Turns out that when hut/hotel staff cheerfully ask, "where're you coming from/headed?", no one expects you to say "we're hiking from Lenggries to Brannenburg." It took me until our penultimate day to get the gap-filling explanation down auf deutsch. The filled gap is visible just southeast of Munich in the video above.
Day 1: Lenggries to the Buchsteinhuette:
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| Early morning at the S-Bahnhof |
We hopped onto the S8 and then a Regiobahn, both courtesy of the 49-Euro Deutschland Ticket, and two hours later arrived in Lenggries. After topping ourselves off with Milchkaffee and Quarktaschen at a bakery, we headed up into the Voralpen.
Cows awaited near the Seekarkreuz:
Views from 1,601m:
There followed a Komoot-forewarned stretch that required clambering down some big rocks, with assorted opportunities for falling a long way down, that put the acrophobe on heightened alert and made her chatty chatty chatty, but she survived and proclaimed it easier than the snow-melt waterfalls above Rifugio Taramelli but harder than the hike from Herzogstand to Heimgarten (which I can't believe I failed to blog about last year, given all the build up in 2017).
Once down, we headed up again, eventually approaching the Roßsteinalm:
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| Check out the rocks holding the roof down |
The Almmaedl were apparently all joyfully skipping and singing their way up to the Tegernseer Huette, but they had left self-serve cake and cold drinks behind.
After pausing for Johannisbeer-Apfel Schorle, we hiked up to the Tegernseer Huette, nestled on the rocks between the Roßstein and Buchstein (both ~1,700m). I failed to take a single photograph, so here's an image courtesy of Wikipedia, shot from the trail up to the Buchstein:
After Kuchen and more Schorle and some time soaking in the great views at the Tegernseer Huette, we hiked down the hill, past Lumpy the Katze, who was hunting rodents in the meadow, to the Buchsteinhuette, our stop for the night, where we had dinner and learned Lumpy's name. Afterward, we hiked back up to the Roßsteinalm to watch the start of the sunset.
The Roßsteinalm Maedl were back from their afternoon frolic and delighted to spot us. They gleefully corralled us into a party celebrating their Midsommer--well past June 21, but the halfway point for their summer season up at the Alm. Schnapps flowed liberally (with the exception of a congealed Eierlikoer, which flowed very slowly), and tales of German-American couples finding cross-Atlantic love were deemed romantic all around. We fuddy duddies departed too soon, declining repeated offers to inhale magical Bavarian snuff, since we needed to make it back down the hillside before dark and lacked the sure-footedness and youthful energy of the locals.
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