Höllen mountains: Feuerkogel weekend hike - May 19
We always admire mountains around Salzburg when driving by. Our friends planned a hike in this area. It is a bit far away from Munich but fine if we go for 2-3 full days. The proposal for the hike was to start from Ebensee and get to Attersee (cross the mountain range around Feuerkogel). Looking at the map, thinking about the valleys - many lakes, ferratas, camps. Looks like a nice place for summer holiday.
Two of us went up to Feuerkogel by a lift, the rest of us (including me) hiked up. We arrived after 10 am to Fuerkogel - tooks us something around 2:15 hours to get up there. Snow started appearing just on the top. Since Feuerkogel, we were walking on the snow almost all day - so much snow in May! We were not certain about snowshoes, all of us had them prepared just in case. After looking from Ebensee to the mountains around, we decided to leave them in the car. The snow cover is hard in the morning, easy to walk on. It got softer in the afternoon with sun radiation, still fine to walk - we were up to our knees only seldomly. The day was very long - it tooks us 10 hours to get from Ebensee to Hochleckenhaus. All was going fine until Rinder hutte. It was closed. It should be open now as they were preparing it for the summer season.
We followed the path from Rinder hutte. There is winter trail and summer trail as we realized later due to not all maps display these two. The summer trail has some steep pasages we wanted to avoid in this winter conditions. We found ourselves 200 meters below winter trail and had to find our way back to find marking for the winter trail. The winter trail is nicely marked but not all the way. We managed to loose the marking twice. The second time, on the way to Jagerkopf, was harder due to lot of mountain pine. We had to cross them few times to get back to the trail. We arrived before 19 o’clock. The black clouds were chasing us at the end of our day but we managed to get to the hut before it started raining!
Our second day hike started at 9 o’clock. It has rained all night, fog settled down around the hut. The start was without snow but soon enough the snowfields started. We again lost our trail, deviate about 100 meters from the trail within few minutes. My expectation for this second day hike was just decent to the lake. It is not, we ascended almost 400 meters. The hike has some good viewing points and scenery around. We waited at Dachsteinblick, but due to fog we did not manage to see much. It cleared later, we could enjoy the Attersee and its sourroundings. The trail for the final kilometers is on the ridge most of the time, clear of snow. As we had second car at Attersee, we were able to return to Ebensee.
If you are thinking about doing this hike, prepare for winter conditions.
Tour info
- Drive
- 2 hour 30 minutes
- Start
- Parking lot at Feuerkogelbahn parking, free
- Duration
- around 15 hours total (2 days) - due to snow and the route marking is not always easy to spot
Activity view
Day 1
Ebensee - Hochleckenhaus hike
Day 2
Hochleckenhaus - Attersee
Note: I tested Ultratrac mode (Garmin watch), the tracked route is bit “off” sometimes - the first day is only 30 km (shown properly on the watch or other services like Strava).
