To Seefeld

After the strenuous day yesterday, we decided to take it easy today and had a gentle 2 km walk to a cable car to take us down the mountain. Even that short distance still took us an hour and twenty minutes over the Alpine path. No new alpine species today, unless you count some small Arabis clumps of uncertain identity, maybe pumila, though there was a lot of Anthyllis vulneraria (kidney vetch, aka woundwort), which we had not seen yet and is not so common.
It was only 7 degrees when we set off, so I put on my new warm fleece for the first time. With bright sunny weather, we had clear views all round, both looking down to Seefeld and back to the hut. The path had some stern warning signs on it about how sure-footed you had to be, but in fact it was much easier than the previous days. That was probably because of the cable car. In Twan Huys' book (which I finished last night) he wrote that it is quite a problem that people with no idea go up into the mountains with the cable car and then try to walk with inappropriate footwear and clothing.
The cable car took us swiftly down to its base station at Rosshütte. That was clearly set up for a large numbers of people in the skiing season, with large concrete areas. It did have an attractive cafe with spectacular views. I had an excellent cake, and Suzanne some wierd 'spekbrood'. When we arrived, we were the only ones there, so it was quite a surprise to turn around and see that it was full behind us.
We descended the rest of the way to the valley bottom by means of a funicular railway, which was fun, then walked into town to find a supermarket for lunch. It felt odd to be walking on tarmac.Read more