.. exploring beautiful places at home, in the Alps or far away
For today the weather forecast actually said a bit of rain and a lot of clouds.. but then it turned out to be the perfect autumn day! From the Kemptener Hütte we walked up and along the ridge of Kreuzeck and Rauheck. The view was really beautiful, we saw a lot of ibexes and next to the Eissee many marmots!
The small town Oberstdorf at the foot of the Alps is a nice place for various outdoor activities like hiking, cycling ans skiing. But there is one more thing which most people are probably not aware off: When the nights are clear one can see lots and lots of stars - even the Milky Way is visible from here.
So while most of the outdoor activists are sleeping great things happen out there 🙂 On a clear evening we took our telescope and spent one night among the stars. Below are some photos of the Milky Way. Some more photos of this evening can be found here.
It was a quite hot afternoon. At about 3pm the weather forecast was still great for the rest of the day. So I spontaneously decided that a little movement can't hurt today 🙂 So I packed a small bag and started to hike from Oberstdorf to the Gaissalpe.
The sun was quite hot but in the forrest it was acceptable. When I arrived at the Gaissalpe I still felt quite good and so I decided to continue walking to the Gaissalpsee. One serpentine followed another but after a while I finally arrived at the lake. The sun was reflected by the turquoise surface of the lake and glinted under the blue sky. Here I made a longer break and enjoyed the landscape.
After the break I felt quite good again and so I decided to go on to the summit of the Rubihorn. The rest of the ascent was luckily in an area without sun. When I finally arrived at the summit I was the only one up there.
I had a clear look down to Oberstdorf and to the north. I just love this place 🙂 For the way down I chose the descent to the Seealpe. It is maybe a little steeper at the beginning but I just didn't want to go all the same way back. At about 10pm I safely arrived back at Oberstdorf.
My conclusion of this day: Sometimes spontaneous decisions are the best 🙂
For some time now we were waiting for the next weekend without snow, rain, storm and extreme heat. And also this weekend didn't look so good at first. For Saturday the weather forecast predicted rain and storms for almost the whole day. However Sunday was supposed to be quite good and Monday was said to be perfect.
So we decided to "move" the weekend by one day and went to Oberstdorf in the Allgäu, again. Our plan was to go to Birgsau by bus and then climb up to the Mindelheimer Hut via the Mindeheimer Klettersteig. The next day we we wanted to climb down to Mittelberg very very early to get back to work not too late.
So in short - this basically worked out as planned! However, this was our first via ferrata this year and the way up from Birgsau to the entry point was already quite long. So when we arrived at the beginning of the via ferrata we already fell a little tired. I think next time we will sleep on a hut again before entering the Mindelheimer Klettersteig.
From the via ferrata we had a very good view to the left and to the right. To our left we were able to see the Enzian Hut, the Rappensee Hut, the Waltenberger Haus and the Heilbronner Weg. To our right we looked down to the Fiderepasshütte.
At about 7 in the evening we finally arrived at the Mindelheimer Hut. Luckily there was still a free place for sleeping and we even were able to order a dinner! 🙂 The evening on the hut was unusual warm and we had a nice look onto the mountains which were still covered with sunlight.
The next morning when we woke up on the hut we were almost not able to move due to muscle ache! 😀 Still, we made it down to Mittelberg in the end to catch the bus back to Oberstdorf. This was a very nice first tour through the Alps this year! 🙂
On our last La Palma holiday I did lots of experiments with my X-T1 camera. This time I was especially looking into time-lapsing. La Palma is the perfect place for doing this kind of videos. In this short video we want to show the highlights of our last holiday. Lots of stars, clouds and sunsets... 🙂 In order to make this video we visited many different places of the island. Some of them were Roque de Los Muchachos, Mirador del Jable, Mirador del Time and Pico Birigoyo. The music title "Worlds" has been composed by Jacob Tyler. I found it on www.soundcloud.com. I hope you enjoy the video 🙂