The Grossglockner Road, Austria

If you established a drinking game based on the word "Wow!" you'd be drunk within the first ten miles of the Grossglockner Road. And this would be a bad move since nearly every turn in the road is likely to throw you headlong into the valley. I have attached copious amounts of pictures below, but I'm not sure they convey the real awe, danger, or beauty of this place.

To be clear, it doesn't just look dangerous going up or down the road or around corners (where your peripheral vision has its limits, you'll find), it also looks dangerous for the residents whose chalets (houses, rather) are clinging to the side of the mountain (I don't have a picture of one of these houses because I was busy saying something that began with "Holy" and didn't end that way). The danger for the residents is not merely because they travel this road to get a loaf of bread, or because it's a matter of time before a car careens off the road and lands on their roof, rather it's because the actual road to their home is only as wide as two horses pulling a cart, there is no guide rail (so no horse in his right mind would go down it), and the grade from the "main" road is sometimes as steep as a double-black-diamond. Seriously.

Now, some parts of the main road are closed for the winter so I'm not sure how many of these mountain-clinging-chalet folks stay, but I don't see how you'd make it to and from home during the winter without skiing, and I personally wouldn't ski it. Whoever does though would be good enough to get waived into just about any Olympic ski team... except Austria or Switzerland, which is tough luck for them.

As I said, the pictures don't (and probably can't) convey how dangerous and beautiful this place is, and the pictures definitely don't convey two of the greatest aspects of being in the Alps: the smell and the water.

Everywhere you walk or drive, farmers are harvesting sweet grass/hay and the sweetness perfumes the air. This sounds poetic to a level I don't feel comfortable with, but it is unfortunately true. Also, nearly any time you see free-flowing water from an outdoor pipe, its source is a mountain spring. (Before you drink it, make sure the word "trinken" is written near the pipe and "nicht" or "kein" is nowhere nearby.)

If it is "trinken" water, not only is it the only chance you'll get to have an ice-cold beverage in Europe, but the taste will make the 80% of your body that is water, jealous. (I don't know what that means, but trust me that water bottled from the source loses something in transport.)

We literally could not get the kids away from these springs without threatening loss of privileges or life. They dangled their mouths under the flow like hungry animals, they dumped perfectly good filtered water on the ground to fill their bottles. When there were two free-flowing spickets next to one another, they debated over which one had the best water, they agreed to disagree, and then they dangled their heads some more. It seemed crazy to see two children under 12 years old this animated over water. In fact, my son declared it to be his first addiction, and as addictions go, it's probably not too bad, but the word "first" got my attention, and I'm watching him more closely now.

Speaking of water, if you go to the Franz-Josefs Hohe overlook, there is a glacier below where you can hike down and touch 10,000-year-old ice. The ice is melting and receding at record rates which they remind you of on the hike down with prominent signs indicating the year the glacier was at that level. Now, I know (or maybe I just feel) that Global Warming is being blamed on the modern generations, but according to the distance between signs, something funky was going on between 1980 and 1985, and I couldn't even drive back then.

Franz-Josefs Hohe Glacier

A negative side-effect of Global Warming (besides the obvious) is that you have to hike several hundred feet farther to the glacier than you would have done in 1990. There is a funicular that goes from the observation deck toward the glacier, but the tracks stop somewhere around 1969. So, even if you're willing to part with 4 Euros each way and you're not afraid of taking a nearly vertical train, you're still doing some hiking--which I guess is poetic justice if you own an SUV.

Below is a picture of a 15th century church in Heiligenblut which is also along the way. If you stopped along the road to take pictures of lovely church spires reaching toward the Alps, you would have time to do little else, but this is the prettiest church I have seen so far. A surprising fact is that there are recent burials in this tiny graveyard. We (my husband) did a little research and found that most graves here are rented for 10 years. After that time, the family gets a bill for the next ten years. If no one is willing or able to pay for it, up they come. We're still researching whether people are then cremated, put into a communal grave, or their bones are put on display in a chapel like they are in Hallstatt (where we are now) or in catacombs like they are in Paris.

Not to dwell on the dead, but another point worth mentioning is there are very few memorials to World War II dead. This is interesting since you can't walk more than a few blocks without seeing one in France. Maybe the presence of the Allies made the stone masons nervous, or maybe they weren't sure how to both honor and distance themselves from the soldiers. Here in Hallstatt, we found a combination WWI and WWII memorial with the words "the living should learn lessons from the dead." In Heiligenblut Church Cemetery, we found the grave of the soldier pictured below, but no attribution to his service except that he died on the Eastern Front.

All in all, there is a 32 Euro fee for driving on the upper portions of the Grossglockner Road, but it's some of the best money you'll ever spend, and we drank at least that much in water.

© 2012 Nicole Wirth

Author of:  Letters to Salthill