2017-02-08 47 11

Location

In Zillertal, Austria, somewhere at the end of route B169 leading through the valley. Judging from the map and later, reality, right on the road. Stilluptal is a very scenic side valley of Zillertal. Absolutely beautiful in summer, not so easily accessible in winter.

Participants

Rincewind (talk) and a ninja-dragalong

Plans

For the last couple of vacations here, I've more or less constantly checked coordinates, but they never seemed reachable as a side activity, or not at all. In the alps, "not reachable" is happening more often than not in winter. Yesterday I saw that the coordinates fall exactly onto a spot at the end of B169 road- which means federal road and hence, has winter service. That looked promising... It was exactly at the other side of the mountain chain where we were skiing, of course, but you can't have everything. So the plan was to simply get my first Austria hash and drag my snowboard wielding friend along.

Expedition

We've had our skiing day and where quite exhausted, but decided to go- you never know when another opportunity might present itself. The B169 road, however, went less and less federal in appearance, getting narrower and narrower with each village. At some point they used signs sparsely, too and we only much later realised we must be on another road just parallel- and on the other side of the small river. But it lead to the spot, anyway, so we proceeded, only to be stopped by a sign that the road is private, damaged and will not be repaired and that it's forbidden to drive there anymore. It wasn't serviced, as well, but it was less than a mile... So we decided to park and hike it. Through snow. With night closing in and being exhausted... After a fourth of the way, we decided to abandon, because the steep climb in snow was a bit much for us. After stumbling back to the car, we tried to find back the B169 road, which was probably easier than losing it in the first place. Two miles on, we passed the spot, made the necessary photos, marked the spot (with non-permanent chalk marker spray) and then reversed the car for a (completely unproven) speedracer achievement. That was not too hard or dangerous to get, since the road is limited to 30km/h at the site. :)

If I hadn't lost directions, it would have qualified for an easy hash achievement, even. Made it back and now we're recovering from all our adventures.