I went on a conference up above in the mountains in Austria. I was surprised to find out that in the schedule, a day is left out for "other planned activity". I could easily decipher that people might be wishing for a party, but not a gala day-night long party, right ? Later the professor disclosed that the daredevils (including him) wish to use this opportunity for a group-hike in the mountain. :) I guess I had not heard such sweet words for a long time, and from that very moment started to look forward to this event :)
Then one fine morning, we headed from our University towards this place called Bartholomaeberg in Vorarlberg, Austria. It's a very small village up in the mountain from where spectacular views of Mt. Zimba and drei Tuerme (three sisters) were visible, as well as the city down in the valley. We stayed in a chalet for a few nights and enjoyed the landscape with, off course an extensive conference session. Then the hike-day (yaaay!) came, 6 of us headed towards more challenging trek while the rest decided only to go uphill for a small untiring walk.
Without showing pity to these non-hiking fellas, we happily started our trip to move towards Silvretta Alps. A dam, named Vermunt-Stausee is constructed up in the hills where we got down from our cars and initiated the hike. The first impression was to hike up to a hut in the Alps, but later we found that the hut was closed due to extreme weather conditions in the last few days. Fearing that we might starve with water after having a very strainous hike up in there, we chose another section of hike to Mt. hochmaderer, where we assumed that the hut is open. Though we never really ended up in the hut, our assumption was not wrong while we distantly saw a few other hikers from the opposite ridge to reach and enjoy drinks and beverages at the hut.
We crossed a small mountain stream and started to ascend with an eye on the landscape, that evolved very fast. The Vermunt-stausee started to display it's shape more robustly, finally making a complete disappearance after we landed in the first mountain valley up. The slopes weren't really steep, but I slipped once while I wasn't very careful and was enjoying to take pictures while ascending. I rectified that, only to start taking pictures after reaching the summit. A group of Europeans that we saw at the start climbing with poles, huge backpacks and what not, were found chilling out in a neighbouring fountain. The ice though were melt and green grass reigned the place, high up there were still some leftover structures of ice.
Then started the last and most difficult part of the climb - good amount of steep ascend and the landscape was totally rocky. The last part were too challenging for me but I never wanted to quit when the destination is not very far, so I dared myself to go. Thanks to my destiny, I could make it well to the top and the reward was truly spectacular. The name of it was Hochmadererjoch, and "joch" denotes the V-shape. Up above, I could look at both valleys, distant Austrian dams, Swiss mountains of the east, and the crazy playing of the clouds and their reflection. I also saw a few Marmot and Ibex while going up. We rested and had our lunch there, took some beautiful group photos, celebrated our victory and finally decided to descend. While descending, we rested a little bit near the fountain. Finally, the Hochmadererjoch wasn't visible and the lake down was visible. The broken clouds and their reflection made the moment a really really unforgettable one.
After descending, we walked a little more towards the Silvretta-Stausee dam and had our late lunch at the Madlener Haus. The austrian delicacy offered to us was Kaiserschmarn with Appelmuss, it's a sweet cheese preparation. After having spent a great day, we came back to the Vermunt-stausee lake to catch our cars. Finally, Au-revoir to Silvretta and we came back to Bartholomaeberg for the next day's conference. The trip though we had in 2012 takes a permanent history in the memory, only good-memories.