Hochfügen, Österreich

This past weekend I made it to Austria!! Friends of a friend - who are now my friends - invited me to join them on their weekend trip to their hütte (cabin) in the mountains. Until we were in the Alps, I did not realize that we were going to Austria. But now I've got another country under my belt. I don't think I'll make it to Vienna, Megan, but the Tirol region is close enough. Here was our route. What was really nice about it is that we climbed up the northern range of the Alps, and then dropped into the Inntal, which translates into 'Inn valley'. {This is just like the lakes, which are 'see', such as Königssee, where I went last weekend. Although, the English maps usually write 'Lake Königssee', which means 'Lake King's Lake.'  It's kind of like 'The La Brea Tar Pits' [more about that in my next post].} The Inntal is the valley of the Inn river, which flows into the Danube (or the Donau in Germany). There's a very nice map on the Wikipedia page. Of course, up river is the city of Innsbruck, which, since brücke means bridge, means 'Bridge over the Inn river.' It's amazing what a little language can teach you!! Here is a photo of a town on the Aachensee, which we passed just above the Inntal.

So then we crossed the Inntal and entered the Zillertal, which, as you might guess, is the 'Ziller valley.' The Ziller is a river that flows into the Inn. There is a lot of skiing up the Zillertal - really in the mountains above the Zillertal - and we headed up into the mountains at the town of Fügen. At the end of the road was the ski area, hotel, and cabins, called Hochfügen. And here's a photo from the front porch of the hütte, which overlooks the ski area.

It reminds me alot of the Big Bear/Lake Arrowhead area of LA. It's about a 2-3 hour drive from Munich, the cabins are at 1.600 m (about 5,000 feet), and the upper peaks that are visible are 1.000 m (3,000 ft) higher. The snow is at lower elevations here, I guess because it's further north. But it's very similar. And, of course, the first order of business was to decide which beer to drink!!

Here's the same view the next morning, when the sun was on the slopes. The temperature varied from about 2˚C - 10˚C. It was cold but pleasant because of the sun.

At the local tavern, I posed with a young friend next to a sign that must be wrong? The circumference of the earth is close to 40.000 km. Even though the Earth is an oblate spheroid, with an equatorial radius of 6378 km and a polar radius of 6357 km, this makes any circumference within 100 km of 40.000. This sign implies a polar circumference of 41.390 km, which is definitely too large. The equatorial circumference is 40.074 km, and the polar distance must be less that that. I didn't notice this until I was posting this photo. I don't know if I'll make it back there, but if I do, I'll let the proprietor know!