Inside the Thrilling, Slightly Terrifying World of Austrian Hut-to-Hut Hiking - In Austria, where the Alps cover 62 percent of the country, hiking is just a part of regular life. An intrepid American writer laces up his boots.
Attachment 37002
Attachment 37003
A four-day, three-night hike through the Austrian Alps had struck us as ideal for our purposes. Our purposes were: Have fun. Don’t carry too much stuff. Let someone else cook. Finish each day’s trek at some sort of convivial group lodging, without having to hike back into town each night. Each day’s hike was around six miles (except for the last day, which was 12 but mostly downhill). We were all decent if hardly
obsessive hikers, and the hope was to brush up against what remained of the golden age of alpinism, that decade or so of mountain lust in the mid-19th century when many of Europe’s highest peaks were summited, and Romantic sensibilities about them helped transform conceptions of nature itself. Of course we wanted that.
Making all this possible was the patchwork of humble but homey mountain huts erected mostly toward the end of that century, perched on rocky promontories and tucked into soft, rolling valleys. You can find these buildings throughout the Alps, though the flavor and provenance differ by country. Many huts in Slovenia were created by anti-fascist Partisans, for example, while Austria’s huts were born of a more romantic sensibility: balm for the soul, solace from the depletions of the industrial world, and so on. Many of Switzerland’s huts date back to the Middle Ages, when shepherds needed shelter during their months in alpine pastures.
Attachment 37004
Attachment 37005
Attachment 37006
The appeal of these places isn’t just cozy lodging and a home-cooked meal, but the wholly different spirit behind them. Like a comprehensive rail system or functional health care, the mountain hut is one of those institutions we don’t really have in the States. Various structural explanations exist, but ultimately it bespeaks a basic difference in how we relate to our wildlands. In the United States, we sing about our mountains, carve faces on them, send postcards of them, and, once in a while, after much preparation and buying of gear, we actually climb them. Mountains for the average American are Special Occasion geography. In Austria, where the
Alpine Club boasts more than 600,000 members (nearly 7 percent of the population) and an afternoon
Wanderung is as accessible and likely as a coffee, mountains are just a regular part of life.
https://www.afar.com/magazine/an-adv...=pocket-newtab