by Adrian Walker

In the beginning there was a plan. Nick Harris had already done half a dozen tours in the Austrian mountains, mostly the Tirol, and had devised a good route, booked the huts and made up a group of eight, all experienced mountain walkers and mostly people he knew from previous trips. A fine summer holiday was assured for all. And then the world got Covid.

Two years later he dusted off the tour, and most of the same people agreed to go on the new trip, glad to get back to the Alps. Then Nick’s wife became seriously ill; he needed to be at home so had to find a new leader, which is where I came in. I had qualified as a tour leader five years previously but hadn’t led a trip due to a mixture of Covid and other factors. Five weeks before the tour started I went to Nick’s house to find out, amongst other things, where the Tirol actually is and how to get there. I clearly did not have adequate preparation for leading a group of six people over mountains I’d never seen before, but Nick was desperate. I had walked from the Pyrenees to the Atlantic which seem to be enough for him, so he handed over the leadership and all the bookings to me. Unfortunately, when they found that Nick wasn’t leading the tour, four of the group decided to cancel, leaving just Reggie and Captain Beefheart, so we recruited three others, the main selection requirement being that they had to be available at a month’s notice.

We met at the agreed bus stop in Uttendorf in the Pinzgau valley. Warm sun, easy walking up to the Rudolfshütte (2315m) in the Hohe Tauern, a good start. Reggie and Captain Beefheart were fast and fit. I am slow uphill. Irish Pete could only do the first week due to work. Richard from Bolton had bags of experience, but his best days were behind him. Ron from Dublin turned out to be Veronica and was due to have a hip replacement operation in two months but said “Everything will be fine, if I take enough Ibuprofen”. The walk on day two didn’t seem that far and appeared reasonably flat, ending at Sudetendeutsche Hütte (2650m). Captain Beefheart and Reggie went ahead to bag the Spinevitrol (2483m) en route but then I dropped the map and wasted two hours going back for it, and it turned out that every kilometre was either uphill or downhill with not a scrap of it flat, so we arrived at the hut late for dinner.

Day three was going to be long, 18km with 1000m of descent at the beginning, 1100m of ascent at the end, with some road walking in the middle and a thunderstorm forecast for the late afternoon. The road had a bus service running every two hours so we headed down to the bus stop outside a bar where we learned that the bus was an express service and didn’t stop there. Richard was getting problems from an old ankle injury and Irish Pete was finding it tough, so they headed for the nearest town to seek medical advice. Fortunately the smooth-talking Captain Beefheart negotiated for a random customer to give the remaining four of us a lift for a remarkably small fee to the Tauernhaus, a nice hotel at the bottom of the valley, and we set off upwards in hot sunshine. At 2000m we needed to make a decision - a jeep track up the valley or a footpath which led past some lakes, over a col at 2593m and then along a ridge to the St. Pöltner Hütte. With no storm in sight, we chose the latter which, after we were committed, was obviously a bad idea as the sky rapidly grew dark.

I had plenty of experience of sitting out thunderstorms around Chamonix. One has little choice but to find a safe spot where there is something higher than oneself so the lightning will hit that, and then just accept you are going to get absolutely soaked while waiting for the storm to pass. The lightning started just as I got to the col, so I waited just below until all the banging and crashing got reasonably remote and then set off along the ridge, at which point a monumental hailstorm started. The ice pellets were huge and the wind was so strong I couldn’t even get the shelter out, so I just got peppered. Meanwhile, Reggie had tried to outrun the storm and had got to the hut without being barbecued en route, but not without getting thoroughly scared. Once the storm eased off a bit, I continued along the ridge to find the hut guardian had been alerted by Reggie and had come out to look for us and some other parties, armed with very welcome hot tea. He got Ron and Captain Beefheart to another shelter in a safe spot and then we set off to the hut where we dried out and joined those who had got there before the storm started.

After that the tour normalised to an extent. Richard had been x-rayed in the local hospital, and we met him and Pete walking up to the Badener Hütte (2608m). As soon as we were six again, Irish Pete decided he could stay for the second week - no problem, except that we had only booked places for five. Coincidentally Reggie had double-booked the second week with a mountaineering course near Innsbruck and would have to leave. Once again the numbers were right and the bookings were right, provided I answered to the name Herr Harris.

With the benefit of hindsight, should we have gone to the St Pöltner Hütte that day? Certainly, going up the jeep track would have been wiser, since it is sheltered in a valley, but we had also considered the possibility of delaying for a day. The problem with that was that it messed up the bookings for subsequent huts and they were all full, the issue being settled when we phoned the St Pöltner Hütte warden and were told we could either arrive on the booked day or not at all. In retrospect, the storm only lasted an hour, we were on the vulnerable part of the route for less than that, and if either we or the storm had been an hour earlier or later, we wouldn’t have had a problem that couldn’t be solved by just sitting and waiting until it went away.

In between all this we managed to do some great walking in beautiful mountains. We got rain at some point every day, but usually the weatherman had the decency to wait until we were (almost) in the hut. There were more thunderstorms but not that close. We had some sunshine. Richard had an unintended slide down a snowfield but only grazed his arm. We climbed over the Galtenscharte in a fine drizzle, which Allan Hartley’s book advised “should only be undertaken in good weather” but it turned out to be a pile of rubble in which the mist blocked out both any views and any fear factor which one might have experienced. Altogether a good time was had by all.

After the storm by John Cowburn; Group on Turmljoch by Anon

Receding glacier, Großvenediger by Johnny Regan; Marmot by Eissee Hütte; Sudetendeutschütte by John Cowburn

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