A gem towards the east

by Irene Auerbach

A stop on the Skiing World Cup circuit, the village of Hinterstoder in Oberösterreich sits at an altitude of not even quite 600m. If people go to the Alps, they want the scenery to be dramatic and this it most certainly is.

The mountains around the village, most of them to the west, the Totes Gebirge, rise to between 2200m and 2500m - just as around the more famous Engadin valley in Switzerland, where the peaks lie at a similar relative altitude to the valley floor. Do you now think that it’s a resort suitable only for crack athletes? Wrong again. Yes, you can climb the Großer Priel (2515m) and the Spitzmauer (2446m) (though you will need to spend a night at the ÖAV’s Prielschutzhaus (1420m) as the two together can’t be done in a day), but there is also a network of less strenuous walks. The fourteen colour-coded walking routes are mostly circular, ranking from a totally flat 2.9km which the tourist office reckons will take you an hour, to a 20km walk along the Steyr river (so still only 250m altitude to master in a leisurely 8 hours). There is a marvellous network of minibuses which take you to the starts of these walks and home again in the evening. As with the cable car and lifts, the minibuses are free to guests lodging in the village.

Hinterstoder plays host to a wide range of accommodation and restaurants. If you’d rather feed yourself than stay in a hotel, there are two competent little supermarkets. There is a small museum (Alpineum) featuring the history of the Stodertal for the occasional rainy day, and even a good local doctor (just in case). Getting to the village by public transport is easy: trains from Linz (where all fast trains to Vienna stop) to call at Windischgarsten (some stop even closer at Sankt Pankraz/Hinterstoder) and, you guessed it, there’s a bus service from train to village. All that is presided over by the Spitzmauer, watching over? towering over? the village with a profile that as unmistakable as the Matterhorn, only with the huge difference that Hinterstoder isn’t as swamped by tourists as is Zermatt. The area seems very popular with locals - the author heard only Austrian accents during nearly a week’s stay in 2019.

Hinterstoder could also serve as a pit stop on a hut to hut tour: Bad Aussee (660m) – Loserhütte (1497m) – Albert Appelhaus (1638m) – Pühringerhütte (1637m) (take earplugs … ). Then comes the pièce de résistance: the lap to the Prielschutzhaus, described variously as taking .5 to 6.5 hrs and adorned with warnings to take plenty of water (no brooks: the Totes Gebirge, or Dead Mountain Range, doesn’t bear that name for nothing) and only to be attempted in good weather (the entire Totes Gebirge is limestone, and wet limestone feels like soap under one’s boots). That soapy effect of wet limestone is the small flipside of a marvellous A-side: plentiful, often unusual flowers growing out of every nook and cranny that rain has washed into the rocks by the paths, many of which look as if they’d been sculpted by Henry Moore. The Prielschutzhaus lies on even longer long-distance routes than the one suggested here, namely the 66-stage Purple Trail of the Via Alpina. It is also the base from which to climb a number of dramatic peaks, not just its name-giver, and has two via ferrata nearby, one of them the longest in Austria.

Hinterstoder doesn’t only face west: there are also attractive excursions towards the south- east: the next hut in that direction, Zellerhütte (1575m), has featured twice in recent editions of Bergauf, our mother club’s excellent magazine, and lies on the route up the Warscheneck (2388m).

Summing up: the Austria Alps are much more than the Tirol plus the Großglockner and the Großvenediger. There’s a lot worth visiting further east.

Editor’s Note: Hinterstoder is the sister-village of Vorderstoder, which featured in a recent petition [highlighted in the Winter 2020 Newsletter (228)] to stop a large ski development linking the two.

The Schiedenweiher near Hinterstoder, accessible and picturesque even in mediocre weather,
with the cloud-shrouded Spizmauer peak rising majestically in the background
Photo by Irene Auerbach

The path up to Großer Priel
Photo by Kate Isaak/Walfried Raab

Looking north on the route up Schermberg,
one of a number of spectacular peaks in the Totes Gebirge
Photo by Kate Isaak/Walfried Raab

Gentian
Photo by Irene Auerbach

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