Walking to Italy - Day 8 - Mieders - Steinach

Day 8: Mieders to Steinach

I've just returned from my second long walking adventure of the summer, a 115-mile 7-day hike along the Donau (Danube) from Passau to Linz. S, meanwhile, is on the final leg of a 5-day bike tour through the Oetztal in the Alps with his cycling buddy S. I think this means I have two undistracted hours left to finish blogging about the last four days of our Walking-to-Italy hike.

So where were we...

We headed out of Mieders along the Pilgerweg (pilgrim's path) toward Maria Waldrast (Mary Rest-in-the-Woods), a pilgrimage monastery that dates to the 15th century. As the legend goes, two boys from Matrei discovered an image of Mary growing out of a tree trunk on the mountain. It was hacked out and brought down to Matrei, and after a few years, a monastery was built near the site of the old tree trunk, and the image was brought back up the mountain. The monastery was expanded in the 17th c., reached its heyday in the 18th c., was closed and sold by Joseph II in 1785, bought back by the monks in the 19th c., abandoned again during the Nazi reign, and started up again in 1945. The miraculous image--which it didn't occur to us to look for--was moved around over the years, but returned to Maria Waldrast in 1945. 

As we trekked upward, we passed a sled track, with a bridge over it to prevent collisions.

We hiked the whole way up, but there are other ways to get up mountains in Austria...

The Pilgerweg overlaps with the Quellenweg (spring-source route). Here, according to the signage, is a stone--the Marienstein--where, as legend reports, Mary herself rested for a bit on her way up the hill to Waldrast, and she left her footprint in the stone as a sign that "Mary was here." Goodness, the things we learn by hiking...

We went up uppity up...

...and saw a lot of zonked out cows. Like, not just lying down, but with their heads on the ground too. I didn't know cows did that--would've thought it indicated serious illness, had we not seen cows doing that in multiple fields across multiple days...

At last, Maria Waldrast...

After a short break, we decided to change up our planned route: there was a local maximum elevation to conquer, so we set about conquering it.

Holy cow(s)!

More cows...

Looking back at Maria Waldrast (just left of center):

We zigzagged our way up on a scree-covered trail...

...then passed over a saddle onto a green bald...

...then continued up...

...and up...

...to the Blaser Huette. Because what's a long hike up without cake at the top? There used to be a hut at the very top of the peak, but it was destroyed in a storm, so they rebuilt it slightly below the summit.

Nom nom. The flowers on the whipped cream on S's cake are from the summit, dried and sugared. 

Close-up, cuz they were so pretty:

In case you're wondering, S is sitting on a spinny stool surrounded by maps naming all the surrounding peaks. But I love that this photo makes him look like he's a toddler.

Then we headed down down down into Steinach:

Our hotel for the night was right under the Brenner Autobahn, so we still had a ways to descend...

 

Farmers bring their cows up the mountains to graze for the summer, and the cows sometimes need containing. Assorted strategies are in place to ensure hikers can still access trails... 

The cows in this field were particularly interested in humans as salt licks.

They followed us very closely through the field--a little close for comfort--and looked a tad dejected when the salt licks crossed over the next fence.

At long last, we reached the underside of the Autobahn. Still another half mile to the hotel...

After resting up a bit, we sought out dinner across the river. Perhaps because of the rain, Steinach seemed a little depressed: lots of concrete, not a lot of people.

Truffle hunting, we peeked into St. Erasmus just as folks were arriving for choir practice. On the way back from Worlds-Most-Depressing-Pizza-Restaurant, we stopped in again to catch a bit of the rehearsal. Three notes in, an error led to laughs and a restart, but those three notes were enough to serve as a concert program: Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus, for choir, strings, and organ. Lovely.

Rain accompanied us on our way back to the Autobahn underpass.

Ta da! 13.9 miles hiked, ~4,800 ft elevation gain, ~4,100 ft descent.

Walking to Italy - Day 7 - Hall in Tirol - Mieders

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.

Before we passed the castle, we passed the Bacchus Grotto, wherein some serious 16th-c. partying and drunken debauchery took place.

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. 

Ta da! 15.1 miles walked, ~2,490 ft elevation gain.