WERFEN


as they come. Nosediving to the valley, they’re riddled with caves, crevices and sinkholes. And at the top is a karst plateau that’s redolent of the last Ice Age. “There are many old paths on the mountains,


but they aren’t all marked — knowledge is handed down over generations,” says Werfen’s head of mountain rescue Herbert Deutinger, who I meet in the tourist offi ce where I’m renting equipment for the day. “The plateau has views of the Hochkönig massif, but hikers need surefootedness, a head for heights and a helmet to tackle the Hochkogelsteig trail that leads up there.” The warning isn’t enough to put me off .


I take a minibus from Werfen train station to the Eisriesenwelt ice caves visitor centre, where a stiff , 20-minute hike leads up to a cable car. I get out at its top station and almost miss the trailhead to the Hochkogelsteig. Cut into the mountainside, the trail is barely


more than a boot-width wide and includes sections of via ferrata. Heart racing, I pop on my helmet and clip onto the fi xed cable securing my safe passage. To my right, cliff s fall to the valley below. The scree slides. Though not particularly technical, the


two-hour climb uphill is stiff , exposed and relentless. There’s no shade and the sun beats down as I grapple with rock, spider across boulders and skitter up ladders hacked into the rock face, at times more acrobat than hiker. When I reach the plateau, I follow cairns and


red-white-red markings evoking the Austrian fl ag across the pale limestone, which has been battered, scarred and pockmarked by wind and weather over millennia. There isn’t another soul up here; the silence is broken only by the shrill whistle of a golden eagle returning to its eyrie. From the grassy ridge of 2,281m Hochkogel mountain, the view upstages anything I’ve seen so far, reaching deep into the Salzach Valley and over to the ragged Hochkönig massif. The karst plateau is the cake-topper for the


world’s largest accessible ice caves, Eisriesenwelt (meaning ‘world of ice giants’), where I head the next morning for a 70-minute guided tour. A blast of cold air, like a freezer door being opened, hits me at their gaping entrance. Visitors swiftly put on layers and coats: it might be summer in the valley, with the thermometer notching 25C, but up here, it’s forever winter, with temperatures hovering around zero. “On a stormy summer day, the wind blowing


out of the cave can reach up to 100km/h [60mph],” says bearded, broad-shouldered guide Franz Reinstadler, as he hands out carbide lamps. The elevation of the caves at 5,383ft means


Hikers on the Hochkönig


ALPINE 2024


65


IMAGE: RICHARD JAMES TAYLOR/4CORNERS


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