In late September, 2018, I hiked for eleven days along the E5 long-distance hiking trail. If you walk the whole thing, it starts off on the West Coast of France and takes you all the way to Verona in Italy, but when people talk about walking the E5, they mean they “hiked from Oberstdorf in Germany, to Meran in the North of Italy”. That piece is referred to as the Kernstück in German, the ‘core piece’.
That’s kinda what I walked, but also kinda not. The “standard tour” involves a bus in the middle to skip two days of valley walking through the Pitztal, but that valley walking was really nice, and with good Kasespäztle, if comparatively unspectacular. My original plan was to go all the way to Trento, to visit a friend who was living there at the time – but I didn’t make it that far, either. After a week, I decided that a few more days would be enough, and went home after eleven days to tinker on projects and catch up on life a little, and, y’know, I missed my friends.
But. They were a very beautiful eleven days. Maybe I’ll fill this post in with more details later – I still have stories to tell about “Fernwanderwege being the best German school you could ask for”, electric fences being the work of Satan himself, finally coming to appreciate Radler, and being licked by cows. In the meantime, here are some photos from the path.
Day 1: the Kemptner Hütte, where I slept the first night.
Day 2: Bach im Lechtal, Austria
Day 3: This route is famous enough that you start every day with a group of people, spread out over the course of the day, and then meet up again in the hut on the other side.
Back down out of a secret forest on the side of a mountain into Zams.
Night view from the Venet Gipfelhütte.
Day 4, from the Kreuzjoch. On the right, the Pitztal. On the left, the Inntal.
Day 5. There are big-ass cows with big-ass horns floating around everywhere on the trail through the Pitztal, and signs saying “don’t get too close to the cows, they sometimes get defensive.” 💀
Day 6, a morning by the river in the Pitztal.
I can’t remember if the light was really this yellow or I just overedited the photo.
Out the other end of the Pitztal, and back up the mountain. This waterfall, that river, its source is all in a glacier.
At the top, old snow and the glacier.
… and where we’re staying the night, the Braunschweiger Hütte.
Day 7, mountain portraits.
The Äußere Schwarze Schneid
(lit, ‘Outer Black Blade-edge’).
Trailmarkers
Back down, towards Sölden, through a skifield
The fox, at the Löple Alm
GUEST RACE
Every Friday, start 1p
Day 8, Kai and Christoff and one of the cows that licked me
Crossing into Italy
Somewhere in the Passeiertal
Day 8: (suspicious cat noises)
Day 9: Up to the peak
After 9 days, a fully-integrated mountain man, on the Hirzer Peak
Day 10: classic South-Tirol hiking landscape
The Dolomites in the distance, I think.