July 9 – Alpspitz

Today we mainly did one thing: climb around in the Alpspitz area. It’s the tall one on the left:

And goddamn, was it a beautiful day.

Side note: are these pictures coming out blurry? What about when you click on one?

Anyway, we took a gondola most of the way up. Ain’t tryna do a 6,000ft+ vertical hike to get up there. I am on vacation and have legs that need to work in the near and far future.

The big boy gondola was pretty word, but they really pack you in there like German sardines. It only took about 10 minutes to climb ~4,000ft. Speedy bastard.

Some views from the top:

Pretty sure that sign says the hikes are hard. The first thing we did was to go towards Zugspitze so we could get a look at it:

The trail there looked not fun. Definitely gondola or train up there. After gazing upon the tallest mountain in Germany, we backtracked to head up Alpspitz. Turns out the hike to the top of this consists of rock climbing like pictured below (Drew, tryna climb?):

Or the extremely exposed, hold-on-to-cable, rock scramble way we went. JK, it wasn’t quite that bad. However, we didn’t make it all the way to the top. We got about 90 minutes from the top and it looked like it was gonna rain. Rain on this “trail” would have been deadly. Especially since there were a TON of people hiking it…and the trail is basically single-file. Here are some more views from the hike:

And here is the Garmin map of the hike. Was fun!!! See if you can find the part where I thought I had found an easier way down, but didn’t. Turns out what I was looking for was some death switchback pictured below:

We did not try that. After the big hike, we walked partway down the mountain to a smaller gondola to take us back down.

At the bottom, we stopped at the restaurant for beer and food. I gotta say, I am finding out that I am not a fan of german cuisine. Most things taste like British food if the Brits knew what salt was. Change my mind. HOWEVER, I am now hooked on goulash. That shit is what I am talking about.

After hiking, we walked back to the Airbnb for a quick rest before going for dinner. We ended up getting some Indian food that was extremely delicious, but slower than Michael Phelps if Michael Phelps was a retarded tortoise with one leg instead of an Olympian.

Tomorrow we have a long train ride to Freiberg, so I won’t be able to get as many steps in…bad for the family steps competition. My aunt beat us at the last second this past week, so need redemption this week…

-Babe

P.S. at the top of the gondola, people were paragliding. Insane sport, but not for me…even though it’s pretty easy to get into at SLC. Here is one picture of the crazy people, bae may have more betterer ones she can post

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