The Hills Are Alive

Seeing as how Annie and my plans had rearranged drastically since we left for the summer, we had a gap of about five days to fill and no real idea of what to do with them. So welcome to a few days on improvisation. Where would we go first?

Since I had been regaling everyone I knew with stories of my Grindelwald hiking adventure earlier this trip, and Annie receiving the brunt of it, and seeing as how our hiking plans for Zakopane in Poland didn’t quite work out, due to unfavorable weather and the both of us just being exhausted from the first halves of our trips, we thought we should try our hand again at hiking.

Unfortunately, when you try to book hostels a night or two before you’re supposed to be somewhere, they tend to be full, especially during tourist season in Europe. My first few ideal destinations didn’t pan out. So, luck and numerous full hostels brought me back to Austria, where Annie and I made for the mountain town of Innsbruck, home to the world’s coolest ski jump tower and a golden roof that it pushes like a cocaine dealer, proud host of two winter Olympics, and this summer a host city for – you guessed it – Euro 2008. Wonderful coincidence.

Innsbruck is a nifty mountain city, which is bigger than a mountain town. When you look at it from high up on hills, you can see that it is much larger than say, Grindelwald. It makes it so that, even though you've been hiking for hours, you don't really feel like you've gone anywhere. Kind of frustrating.

Seeing as how one does not get many chances to go hiking in the Austrian Alps, we decided that whatever the weather might be, we would tough it out and do some hiking.

That turned out to be an interesting decision. The weather in Innsbruck is fickle. It rains. It’s sunny. There’s wind. There’s no wind. Some parts have snow. Some parts are dry. And this is all at the same time. Within 15 minutes one can experience almost every type of weather on the planet in this humble mountain city. Dressing appropriately was difficult, and I often found myself putting on and taking off layers.

So when we started our first day of hiking, it was gorgeous. Then it was rainy. Then it was gorgeous again. We hiked up for about three hours, and then we hiked down for about two hours. That is, until we got to Geologensteig.

Coming down the mountain, we thought it would be a good idea to take this shortcut we had noticed on the way up. We disembarked from the main trail and headed town a tiny, windy side path. It got tinier and windier, until it eventually disappeared. Me, being the genius that I am thought I would follow where I thought it would go, and that's when we went over a minor cliff to find a small, windy trail. So we followed that. And things went worse from there. We ended up sliding down half of the mountain, holding on to trees for dear life to prevent us from certain death. And then we ended up in someone's back yard, about 50 meters away from where we should have been. It was an adventure.

Day two saw nasty, rainy morning, and in hopes that the sky would burn off in a few hours, we made our way across the city to catch a glimpse of the Bersigel ski jump tower. I don’t know how many people know this about me, but I am fascinated by the sport of ski jumping. I find it to be ridiculously awesome, in the sense of both awe-inspiring and absolutely ridiculous. To me, it encapsulates everything the winter Olympic Games should be: obscure sports that involve a certain element of mortal peril. People hurling themselves down an ice sheet of metal and flinging themselves several football fields through the air to what could be a devastating crash certainly fits the bill.

Unfortunately, the ski tower costs 8 Euro to enter, and when we learned that, we also learned that we would be content admiring it from afar, though not before taking a few pictures right outside of the gate. Plus, they wouldn’t actually let us ski jump (and, honestly, I wouldn’t let me ski jump either), so that took most of the allure out of it.

With my dreams of Olympic ski jump gold thoroughly defeated by extortionate prices, we made our way back to the same path we started up the day before, not going quite so far, since we were pretty tired from the day before (I haven't been doing quite as much exercise as my body would have wanted this trip).

On day three, we woke up and got ready for our major hike. Too bad for us, the weather wasn't going to let us have a good time, but we thought we would tough it out through the rain and the fog in hopes that it would burn off by the time we got to the top, just like it had other days. After getting lost and following what ended up being the same path as day one (not the shortcut, but the way up), we ended up getting pretty high. As the following picture clearly indicates, the weather did not burn off.

I can’t say that I liked Innsbruck as much as Grindelwald, but it was nice to get out into the fresh air and out of the city again. Grindelwald had that mountain town allure, while Innsbruck seemed like a big city stuck in the middle of the mountains, too big for its location, kind of like when tall men drive Volkswagon beetles.