Memories of Simonyhütte

By Diana Penny Sherpani

In 1971 my husband Graham and I went to work as Christian Aid volunteers at the Salvation Army men’s home in Linz for 6 months.

Our work was to clean, do the laundry, help with the cooking, washing-up and serving in the basement canteen. Lock-up and lights out were at 23.00 when a bed check was carried out, confiscating any bottles found and breaking up the gambling schools in the bathrooms.

We worked six days a week but, by doing extra shifts, were able to save up a few days so that we could have a short holiday in July. The men had a whip round to enable us to travel further afield to the Salzkammergut. After the obligatory tour of the Hallstatt salt mine (wearing pixie uniform and sliding down polished tree trunks to the lower levels) we set off south, steeply up to Wiesberghaus (1884m) and then more gradually to Simonyhütte (2203m). It was hot and I got Tilman’s foot (reluctance to put one foot in front of the other). It was not until 1986 that I learned this was probably the start of altitude sickness!

We stayed two nights and the only other guests were a Belgian priest and his nephew. On the Sunday the priest held a mass for the four of us in the adjacent Dachstein Kapelle; it is the only church service I have ever attended where the officiant wore breeches, red knee socks and boots under his surplice. Thomas, the Wirt (still drunk from Saturday night), was very taken with the idea of voluntary service and said we could work there any time we liked.

We spent February 1972 learning to ski in Leysin, Switzerland, and then returned to Hallstatt at the beginning of March. Our rucksacks went to Wiesberghaus by Materialseilbahn, then by skidoo to the small Materialseilbahn to Simonyhütte. As very novice skiers, it took us very much longer to ski there!

There was no mains electricity, only a small diesel generator for the lift and a few electric light bulbs, supplemented by kerosene lamps. There was a water tank behind the hut for melted snow. One day Graham decided to investigate and found several drowned rats floating on the surface. There was only one long-drop toilet near the front door; it was certainly a long drop on to boulders below. There was no toilet paper but pages of the A5 German Reader’s Digest, half a page of shiny paper to polish your bum! It was too cold to have an offensive smell.

The kitchen had a wood-fired range which had to be relit every morning and we constantly refilled large vacuum flasks with boiling water. There was no refrigeration and, in February, Thomas had brought up supplies for several months. Eggs and cheese were kept in the cellar, but all meat had been buried in the snow, and he couldn’t remember what he had buried where. The menu was decided by what you managed to dig up; it was wonderful to find a whole Leberkäse loaf. There was only dried milk. There was also a small wood-fired stove in the dining room when there were guests.

Upstairs there was only one large Matratzenlager plus two small rooms for Thomas and ourselves. Each bed had two hut blankets (with Fuss Ende printed on each) and a small pillow. It was simply not possible to wash and dry the pillowcases in winter. We went to bed in our clothes. There were no washing facilities and we could only have a stand-up bath in a zinc tub in the kitchen. The same tub was used for washing our clothes.

There was a telephone, and every morning I had to give a weather and snow report for national broadcast. There was a max/min thermometer but I had to guess the cloud cover and how much snow had fallen during the night and I had no idea how to guess the wind speed.

There were very few visitors and my meagre culinary skills were not over-stretched. Inside we cleaned thoroughly but outside all we could do was clear off the new snow from the windows. We filled our time by skiing on sunny days. (Ladies: never ski topless. I nearly ended up looking like an Amazon one day.) Or we could dig tunnels to the Materialseilbahn or the chapel, discovering new meat caches en route. By May we had had enough of drunken Thomas and decided to leave, skiing down to Wiesberghaus with 25 kilos on our backs. We very quickly learnt not to fall over, or we ended up on our back like a beetle. It was wonderful to come down to a green world. Thomas never paid us for our 10 weeks’ work.

In November 1972 I became Club Secretary for the AAC Sektion England (now Alpenverein Britannia) but, in 1976, there was an advertisement for a new Wirt at Simonyhütte. Graham and I applied but Sektion Austria, which owned the hut, was not interested in foreigners. Graham got a job at the Austria Hütte on the other side of the Dachstein and he drove down in our car. By now I was Tours Manager at Ramblers’ Holidays, which hosted Sektion England, and I had to drive to work on a Honda 50. Someone had to stay at home to pay the mortgage!

Graham and another lad were sent over to the Simonyhütte for the end of the ski season. One day in May he was sunbathing on the snow and my ginger-haired, freckly husband got rather sunburnt. Back home in July he was diagnosed with malignant melanoma and died in March 1978. After the funeral I asked the undertaker for his ashes so that I could scatter them near Simonyhütte but he had already disposed of them. I imagined Graham sitting on his cloud and laughing so much that he dropped his harp.

So I never returned to Simonyhütte.

Return to the top of this page or to this Archive's Index