Chiemgau Alps: Around Hochries mtb - Oct 19

2 minute read

This week was full of bike trips. Yesterday bike tour was quite demanding for me, it was mainly due to steep climbing sections with rough terrain. Not to mention, I almost cut my shifter cable on the second climb (had to repair it). I was expecting less demanding tour today. Unfortunately it was not, bike tour around Hochries takes about 5 hours and ascending +/- 1600m.

The tour starts in Aschau. We found a free parking at Festhalle. There were lot of bikers starting their tours as well there. The start is easy, compare to yesterday when I started climbing steep forest road after 5 minutes on bike. We cycled through the valley along the river, crossing it multiple times. The bike trail is almost flat until Sachrang village. This is where first climbing starts.

As soon as we gained some meters, mountains around showed themselves. There were plenty of people and unfortunately also cars (these cars were going to/from Goglam). We were looking foward to a moment when we leave the crowd. It came after Goglalm. There is rocky forest road above Goglalm - this is the moment you leave the crowd. Once you climb this forest road,the long traverse is visible. This is S0, sometimes S1 forest road (one part is S2, there is a sign you should push your bike). Once traverse finishes, we need to go down to loose our gain, upset part is that this is just a forest road.

We are climbing again to Schwarzrieshütte. We pass by the hut and this is where the singletrack starts (one of many waiting for us). S1 going up, many hard-tail bikers going the opposite direction. The ascent become more steep after a while. We are losing our energy quickly and stopping by for refill. Once we get some energy back, we continue towards Feichteckalm. We are convincing ourselves the second climb is over soon.

We pass by Karkopf. There were strong winds in the afternoon today. The trail goes up and down until the crossroad below Hochries. We decided to follow the proposed track instead of going through Hochries summit. We were after food and rest more than summits at this stage. We descended until we pass by a cottage. This is where the “flow trail” starts, beatiful traverse S1 trail that goes all the way to Riesenhütte. We missed the note that this hut is closed due to renovation (as I read it, it shall be opened in a year or so, the work has not yet started). We continued down via the forest road, finding some smaller trails along the way. We finally found a hut opened - Hofalm. After a short break, we go down via Milli-trail. It is currently covered by leaves which hide all the rocks and roots from eyes. It has lot of surprises. There were dozen of people descending this trail.