Saturday 8th June: Weather: 15°C to 22°C: Overcast and cool then sunny. No rain
Hintersteinersee to Kufstein: 15k walk along the WKS - Wilder Kaiser Steig Route 823. 4hrs 9am to 1pm
Accommodation: City Apartment Your Home 3 Maximilian Strass, Kufstein
Leaving Gasthaus Barnstatt
Overcast skies on Hintersteinersee
Forests, meadows and mountains
Morning coffee by the stream
Logs blocking teh patch
Overlooking the Inn Valley
Into Kufstein
Decorated arches in Kufstein
Celebrations i main square
Lunch in Kufstein
Our apartment Kufstein
Mini kitchen
Ash Barty wins French Open
20k walk around Chevreuse
20k walk around Chevreuse
Highlight today was finding that the low route, the Wilder Kaiser Steig, to Kufstein was a wonderful walk through forests, meadows and farms. The high route was closed because of snow as low as 1200metres. The locals haven't seen anything like it before we’re told again.
Awake at 6.30am and after talking to the family at home, it's down to a lovely buffet breakfast. Other hikers there had spoken to the guest house cook who spoke English and he had lots of local knowledge about the tracks and said the high route was closed. We then all decided to take the low route to Kufstein along Route 823 known as the WKS or Wilder Kaiser Steig.
We left at 9am to a cool walk around the Hintersteinersee, then through a forest track which joined Route 823, the WKS. It was easy enough to follow and was very pretty looking down over the valleys across to the snow capped alps. At 11 O’clock, we have coffee on a bench seat beside a running stream. Then over and under a small section of about 20 or so fallen trees across the path to reach a lookout point down onto the Inn Valley.
It’s overcast, but no sign of the predicted rain as we continue on a down hill forest track, sometimes crossing meadows with farm houses. We’re amazed to find that Austria is more like Switzerland with it’s pretty houses, meadows, cows and neatly stacked firewood. Except there’s no cows in the fields. They’re all still in the barns which are vented to the outside, wafting cow odours the only sign there’s cows inside.
By 1pm we’re in the old town of Kufstein. It’s full of tourists in the main street where we sit on a park bench and have lunch - cheese and fresh bread from the nearby SPAR supermarket. At 2pm, it’s time visit the Mpreis supermarket to buy tonight’s dinner and then walk to our apartment, about 500 metres through the town. Maximilian Strass is easy to find, but number 3 isn’t. It’s hidden behind another building. On pressing the buzzer, the owner Mike responds and remotely opens the front door where we find a key to our room upstairs which we soon find out when you pull the handle, not push.
He meets us there a few minutes later. The apartment is perfect for us. A Queen bed, mini kitchen. lounge, table and most importantly a large TV as the French Open tennis has just resumed with Dominic Thiem defeating Novak Djokovic. Drinking one of our ice cold beers, it’s a nail biting time watching Ash Barty defeat Marketa Vondrousova 6 - 1, 6 - 3.
Dinner time. Ham, lettuce, cheese, tomato with mayonnaise, washed down with two more cans of cold beer. Then it’s time to reconsider our options for the next few days. With so much snow below 1500metres, it now doesn’t seem possible to walk through the the Pendinggruppe Ridge tomorrow, not the Karwendal Mountains in a few days time where the average height is around 1800 metres. Not high at all by our standards, but when there’s so much snow and fallen trees at just 1300 metres, we know it’s not going to be possible. One day in particular at Binsalm looks out of the question, and we’ll probably have to get the train back through Innsbruck to pick up the track at Sharnitz on the other side of the Karwendals. We’ll think about that more tomorrow.
Mike has done a wonderful renovation of our apartment and I’d give it 10/10 on booking.com. The bed is super comfortable and we turn the lights off at 10pm. But the night is warm and we have to pull the donnas out from their covers, which we use as just a sheet.