View from our balcony
Goodness, Readers, when it rains it really rains in Obergurgl. Here I am on Thursday afternoon looking out at the view above, and you literally can’t see a thing. Last night there were some very fine storms that happened more or less all night, and here’s a brief excerpt of the rainfall (sound up!)
Still, it’s one reason that the hills around here are so green, so we shouldn’t really complain. This morning we popped out during a brief interlude of dryness and headed up the Hohe Mut lift to see what was going on. There was a little bit of blue sky for about twenty minutes (sunglasses on!)
We spotted several marmots, but only got a blurry photo of this one. Who knew that the Hohe Mut lift would become the key location for marmots this year? Sadly, a new bike track is being built, so I imagine they’ll all have moved again by next year…
Blurry marmot!
I spot a raven circling above the Gaislach valley (to the left of the hut) so hotfoot it over to see if it’s still around. And of course I need to take a few more photos of the Hohe Mut saddle and the Gaislach and Rotmoos valleys on either side.
There are little pockets of gentians here – I wish I could bottle up that extraordinary blue for when I’m back in London. Nothing comes close and the photo doesn’t do it justice.
We pop along to the Hohe Mut Alm for a cuppa, and watch as the cloud starts to come in again.
The Hohe Mut Alm
The view along the Rotmoos
The cloud percolating back along the valley
And then there’s the lift back down.
And on the way we pass this blob of snow, which has been puzzling me somewhat. I’m wondering if it has a blanket on it, like the ones we saw in the Tiefenbach glacier? See what you think. It looks a bit curly at the edges to me, which might indicate a nylon glacier-duvet…
And then it’s down to the Backerei (Bakery) for a cappuccino. It closes between 12.30 and 14.00 every day, which is a bit inconvenient but then it is run by one woman all on her own, and she definitely needs a break. I love just sitting here, watching the buses coming and going and the drivers getting into arguments about whether the Piccard monument is the centre of a roundabout or not. Plus today there was a huge red coach parked in one of the local bus stops, en route back to Hamburg, and the Guide was an enormous chap wearing lederhosen and a hat with a feather in it. Don’t let anyone tell you that village life isn’t full of excitement.
Not more mountain bike tracks defacing and gouging out mountainsides… I’ve seen far too many of these in the last few years around Saalbach and Kitzbühel. To me, and this would seem particularly relevant in Obergurgl, creating (more) mountain bike runs is a final, desperate act to bring in (more) summer tourists to areas where ‘footfall’ has dramatically decreased.
I would say that ski resorts have already blotted the landscape with all that ironmongery. As snow becomes more unpredictable, winter numbers will inevitably decrease, so it only makes sense for them to try and develop the summer season. Mountain bike runs are far less intrusive than the large ‘scrapes’ left by the ski runs.
Each to their own opinion. I object to mountain bikers straying onto hiking paths, where near misses and accidents are not unheard-of. Woe betide a hiker who accidently ends up on a bike trail…
I know what you mean about the gentian blue. Cameras can never capture it. That blob of snow is almost certainly a blanket. If it were left to the elements it would be all wrinkled and black in places (and there would be other patches of snow in any shaded crevasses nearby). I see the lift goes to 2670m, which is a relatively low altitude (and I think you said the patch was below that?), so I would be surprised if it survives the summer.
The white patches are where snow has been bulldozed into piles and then covered with a reflective surface (in this case white plastic sheeting) to attempt to preserve some for the following year’s ski season, this has been tried on the Marmolada glacier in the Dolomites for some years, albeit on a much larger scale. The snow will be incorporated into a mixture of new snowfall and snow-machine snow for the next season. There are two such patches at Hochgurgl, both experimental,