After a delicious pancake breakfast and some faffing around at our accommodation Brendan and I headed off to the Attersee for some klettersteig fun. It was a bit overcast and windy but not rainy so probably pretty good conditions really. We headed off at a leisurely pace but it seemed more fun to go fast so we cranked up the via ferrata. It was often quite steep and needed a bit of arm-haulage but it wasn’t too difficult. We got to the top in around 1 hour 45 minutes including the walking to the start. After a “gipfel” photo we headed back down at a trot. After following the zig-zags got boring we cut directly down loosing the main track and following some other track back down to the road. We knocked the whole thing off in about 2.5 hours, a full 3 hours faster than the guide. Good fun.
We followed the klettersteig with a quick dip in the Mondsee and then drove back to St Gilgen where we met the others for a picnic lunch at the Plombergstein crag. They had been doing some routes at the AV-Klettergarten there.
I was keen to try out some multi-pitch and Sebas wanted to try some harder routes so we headed around the side of the crag in search of the multi-pitch. They seemed in use so we briefly considered going off to do the Drachenwand klettersteig before deciding it was too late in the day.
Instead Domi and Brendan headed off to do an easier ferrata route (turned out to be the Drachenwand!), Ari, Sebas and Sam went off to do some harder climbing, and Johannes and I set up to do a multi-pitch route.
The route in question is named Taxus. It’s a 5 pitch route that is a mix of grades up to 4+. The first pitch is 60m, then 40m, then three 50m pitches. Here’s the topo courtesy of bergsteigen.at.
I did the first pitch and then Johannes climbed up and past the anchor to do the second pitch. All the anchor points were quite comfortable and sometimes under trees which would be nice on a very hot day. There was a nice view out across the Wolfgangsee.
At some point as we were climbing two shirtless guys climbed past us without a rope. I guess the climb is pretty easy… We topped out and then walked back down passing under impressive looking rock walls. Despite the route being so easy it still took us a good few hours.
We managed to miss the last open supermarket so instead we picked up some pasta from a petrol station and had pasta and pesto with the remains of the salad back at our fancy house. A good day.
