The hikes of the previous day included very little gain in altitude, and a lot of sitting on boats. Today would be the opposite. Now this being a ski village, it had a ski lift called the Jennerbahn which scoots people up and down The Jenner, a mountain situated right next to the small town of Schönau on Königssee, the small, quintessentially Bavarian town which sits at the northern end of Konigssee (Kings lake).
Mount Jenner has spectacular panoramic views of the area. So as per usual, we arrive to see the base of the life undergoing renovations and is closed for the foreseeable future. So with this in mind, we head out on our second day of hikes. The first is a short, sharp intermediate loop up to a popular viewing point which stares straight down the length of Konigssee.
The view is peaceful, and picturesque, so we sit down and pull out an assortment of fruits, muesli bars and just general hiking related snacks. We only ate breakfast an hour ago, but hiking makes you hungry. It is at this point, that i begin to realise that my substitute hiking boots, a pair of heavy, black-leather timberland's are not my heels best friends. I can feel the beginnings of a blister on one heel. So I places some bandages over the heel as a futile form of blister mitigation. The damage has already done - the blisters are now an inevitability.
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We set off on completing the loop and head back into town where the next route starts. Every now and then Konigssee can be seen through a break in the trees and lets us know how much or how little progress we have made.
We cross green fields and commit to a blue level hike. (Blue:Easy, Red: Intermediate, Black: Expert and the next level is full on climbing I am pretty sure, I dunno, we don't bother ourselves with anything above red.)
This route is a 3.5 hour hard slog up a steep mountain track. The terrain is good enough for a car to easy drive up and down, but for walkers it seems like a never ending climb. I set the pace. maybe a little too fast, because we pass a new sign every 5 minutes, while the estimated time is shaved by 15. We are covering good ground. Good, hot and sweaty, blister massaging, heel burning ground. Timberlands were a huge mistake and I look over at our friends light-weight hiking boots with silent regret at having not bought a pair like I said I would. Both his shoes combined were half the weight of one of my own... but I made my bed...
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The road widens and narrows periodically, it also steepens sharply and flattens out every now and then so we never really know whats around the bend. We eventually can see our goal, a hut located halfway up the mountain... and lunch!
It serves food and drink... and beers. Frosty, refreshing beers. So with our goal in sight, we power up the last leg and sit down finally, having completed the 3.5 hour incline in under 1.5 hours. Beers are deserved, because, well, this is Bavaria, do as the Bavarians do.
It is this point which I empty out my bag to find the rest of the muesli-bars, after two wieners and some bread don't completely satiate my hunger. Down the bottom, I find my pair of Nike's I had hurriedly packed in the morning before we left. I remembered that I had planned for the Timberland's to be sub-par hiking boots. They are great for the city, in the deep winter, but not in summer to climb a mountain. I tend to my rather pathetic wounds, and place on my super-duper-lightweight Nike's with an unnecessarily loud, outward expression of pleasure, which results in me abandoning my hunger for muesli bars only to head back to the bar to get some apple pie to accompany my beer, both of which promptly disappear.
The hut also serves fresh milk from its cows, but neither the cows, nor I, cared much for that proposition.
We sit around for a while debating where to go next... do we keep going, knowing whether the weather will finally close in, or do we begin the long descent, back down the way we came. None of us are ultimately too interested in heading straight back down, so we decide to head onward and upward for now, with a hiking selfie to get us going!
DanedeBeau
This is a follow on from our hiking adventures in Bavaria, and follow My Blog for more!
MTD - Bavaria - Hiking Konigssee - Part 1: Das Boot.
MTD - Bavaria - Hiking Konigssee - Part 2: Germany's Highest Waterfall.
MTD - Bavaria - Hiking Konigssee - Part 3: A Boat, On Water, In Rain.