Edmund Graf Hütte

Austria walking July 2024 Day 7 Niederelbe Hütte to Edmund Graf Hütte

A big day of walking today and although I was lacking sleep, my spirits were high as we arose to a beautiful sunny day.

With the clouds still enveloping the valley far below it was a surreal setting and with the keen crew already way ahead of us, it felt like we had the world to ourselves.

At first the way was fairly gentle and although we took a wrong turn detour for a while, we remained on track time wise to hit the pass at around midday.

The pass, and the highest point on the week for us at 2700 metres, approaches.

We made it!

On the way back down we had one more ice field to traverse

The decent down to the Hütte once it had come into view was steep and treacherous. Not physically difficult but requiring of upmost attention to every step. One lapse and placement of a foot on the loose scree could easily result in a slip and fall and having had experience of how much damage can be achieved in a split second, I moved slowly down careful with every step.

We struck lucky with our room allocation at the very end of the corridor of the fairly new extended part of the Hütte. The bunks were good and of a reasonable size so we tried to get a siesta in…

I didn’t know that there were tribes of Lakota on this continent actively trying to keep up tribal traditions by doing the Sundance but evidently I was wrong and there was a load of them in the room upstairs from us dancing and shouting for over an hour whilst we tried to take a siesta. They should have just looked out of the bloody window to see that their prayers had already been answered! It seems that almost every time that everything else is in place for a quiet comfortable night, there is one noisy German to spoil it all.

A shrine to fallen walkers

We stayed up for as long as possible after the least good meal yet in ‘meat’ curry and it seemed to work as all was quiet upstairs from the 10pm curfew onwards and I had a pretty good sleep.