Hiking Buchstein

While snow was our main obstacle on this hike, other factors contributed to making this our toughest hike ever. I must cite closing down the beer garden the previous night as another culprit.

But it was such a lovely night for beer gardening, and Jul and Scott had never been to Seehaus, a great beer garden on a lake where they once gave me extra curry sauce without charge. I love it there so much. And my beer garden skills have improved at a faster rate than my German skills. I even had the wherewithal to bring a tablecloth. 

All the empty picnic tables made me think of you dad! With the beer stein shaped lights, it's heavenly, no?

So we may not have started this early Sunday hike at full speed, but the real trouble didn't start until over two hours in, where we had to choose between the schwer (difficult) path or the leicht (easy) path to the Hütte (place shown at top where one can get drinks). 

This is where we stood after the first two plus hours, looking at the Hütte about 3/4 of the way to the right there and fantasizing about drinking a gigantic Fanta there. We opted for schwer path to be faster, but we were a little uncomfortable dangling on the face of the rock when the footing was so slippery and decided on the easy route back. 

After finding the Hütte closed, boooo, we started the "easy route" back down where things got really hairy. There was so much snow on the original path that we had to follow this make-shift path someone who was either a highly skilled trekker or a total joker had crafted. We frequently broke through patches of this often thigh high snow which was occasionally fun but moreso painful and slow. This led us up to a steep hill we had to mostly pull our way up on weeds as footing was scarce. I wasn't quite far enough behind Jeremy either and nearly took a couple falling stones to the head. (not the slang British meaning here) Six hours later and soaked from the knees down, we were extra happy to make it back to the car.