Hiking in Garmisch Patenkirchen

Our first hiking trip to the Alps!  A couple weeks ago we took the train  to Garmisch-Patenkirchen in the heart of the German Alps to vacation for three days (Aug 27-29) with our friends the Salditts.

 (Tim Salditt is Thomas' best friend from childhood, and their oldest daughter Annalena --far left-- is our godchild.)
 Nicole Salditt has a friend who owns a cute little "family hotel" at the foot of the mountains in Garmisch, literally a few minutes walk to some of the cable-cars which you can take part way up the mountains.

Here are the kids and I in front of the hotel with the Zugspitze peak (Germany's highest mountain) in the background.  

Let's start at the beginning.  Monday morning we took a regional train, normally 1.5 hours from downtown Munich (although we had to take a bus for part due to track construction, so total of 2 hours) and met the Salditts at the Garmisch train station, quickly checked in, walked to the cable car station and were all hiking by 11 am.  The weather couldn't have been better and the setting was idyllic!  The cable car took us part way up, we hiked for a couple hours, then had lunch at an adorable "Hütte" (little restaurant) near the top of the mountain.  I love how you can have a hot meal and a drink while hiking in the Alps, at least in most places -- very civilized!  Here are some pictures of the way up, and the meadows near the top.

For the way down, we went through a very deep and narrow gorge called the Partnach Klamm.  It's beautiful, if kind of scary in places -- you end up walking through tunnels in the pitch dark!

All in all, about 5 hours of hiking that first day.  It couldn't have been better!

The second day:  Alpspitze (2628 m)

  On Monday evening we had decided to try to summit the Alpspitze, one of the highest mountains in the region, and Tim thought is should be easily doable in a day.  He knows the area pretty well, and didn't seem concerned about us having only about one liter of water per person.  Without getting into too many of the details, it was definitely not easy, and I now truly understand the importance of bringing enough water on hikes :-)  

We left fairly early that morning, half of us taking the bus and the rest in the Salditt's van to the base of the mountain.  We took a (this time large and crowded) cable car part way up, to get to the "good part" faster,  The cable car ended at about 2000 m, already higher than anything in the US northeast!

Here is the sign post right near the cable station, and a view of the Alpspitze peak.

After an hour or so of hiking a relatively gentle rise along the face, it started to get pretty steep. 

There were some iron cables to hold onto in places, and a steep iron ladder (my first real butterflies of this day... not to be my last!) as we made our way up to the "shoulder" of the mountain.  Already we had spectacular views, and had conquered quite a bit of treacherous terrain, so Julia and Thomas decided they had already had quite enough adrenalin for one day, and decided to stay on the shoulder while the rest of us ventured on to the peak.  We misjudged the time to the top so unfortunately, instead of doing a little hike on their own, J and T ended up waiting for us for the 2.5 hours it took the Salditts and B and me to reach the top and come back.  Thomas took lots of great pictures though.

Speaking of pictures, Thomas had the camera, and I didn't, so there are no pictures of B and me farther up.  Which maybe was good, since I needed both of my hands for a lot of it!!  From this point of view it doesn't look bad at all (I can see why Tim thought it would be just half an hour up) but it's truly hard to judge from here.  Much of this was remarkably difficult:  steep and narrow!  Just to give some idea of scale, there are hundreds of people on this peak and on the way up, but you can't see them in this picture.

 If I had known how hard it would be, I don't think Benjamin and I would have gone.  There were places where I was seriously scared.  Parts of the steep areas have secured iron pins and cables, and about half the people doing this part had on climbing harnesses which they attached to the cables.  (We of course had no such thing!)  There are a couple thin "knife edge" parts up there, which don't show at all here -- they looked worse than, though not at long as, the Knife Edge on Katahdin.  And there were several parts where we were "hugging" the mountain, and needed both hands on a cable or rock holds.  I do wish I had taken a camera, to give some idea...
 In hindsight I'm glad I did it.  Benjamin was great -- like a little mountain goat for most of it, but he had some worried moments too.  The view from the top, as you may expect, was spectacular!

Poor Thomas and Julia.  They waited for us for two and a half hours!  (Not knowing where we were exactly, or how long we would be, they didn't venture very far on their own.)  The way back down was beautiful, but this was when we started running out of water!  I was truly thirsty for most of the way down, as were we all.  (In fact at one point Benjamin started to get a little dizzy.)  Luckily, thank goodness, in a valley near the bottom, around 3 or 4 pm, we found cows, but more importantly, a tap with clean water used to fill their water trough.  I have never been so glad to drink water!

 After hiking down most of the afternoon, we had to climb back up a few hundred meters (although not very technical, still hard at this point of the day!) to reach the next (different) cable car station.  We thought about hiking all the way down, but were mostly pretty exhausted by that point.  We'd been out on the mountain for over eight hours.

The third day:  Eibsee
For the last half-day, we just took it easy!  Rode a cogwheel train to the Eibsee, a beautiful lake in the mountains, and went swimming!