Mountain High – Zugspitze

Of course, if you’re staying in Garmisch, then you are bound to end up at the top of its incredibly famous mountain at some point…

This was not our first ascent.  I was introduced to the Zugspitze several years ago when we first moved to Munich.  It was Mother’s Day I remember, which also happened to coincide with Mr R’s birthday.  As his day trumped mine I let him decide what we spent the day doing, and that’s how I found myself a few thousand feet above the ground looking out on this other worldly mountain range with nothing but the sound of the wind and the odd squawk of an alpine chough or two…

As there’s a glacier at the top that’s easy enough to ski, it made sense to introduce the three year old to our favourite mountain now that he had found his “ski legs“…

Given that he’s also train mad (and in order to allow his Father and older siblings to get a few runs in first before we both got to the top), I volunteered to take the Zugspitze Bahn (one of only four rack trains in Germany) to the top with him, which gave me the chance to relive happy memories of our first trips…   By the way, if you’re taking the train for the photo opportunities, don’t hang about – the latter half of the journey is in a tunnel carved through the mountains!

If you fancy a slightly faster way up than the 45 minute train journey, the new cable car is now in operation.  Whereas the old one could fit around 30/40 people and took a good deal longer to get up and down, this new impressive beast  fits around 120 people, and takes around ten minutes.   Typically for me however, it did stop for a few minutes on our descent, leaving me wondering what on earth was going on, whilst repeatedly apologising to the surrounding people as the three-year old was intent on touching people’s hands that day (don’t even begin to ask me about the episode where he helped himself to a large chunk of a complete (luckily very lovely) stranger’s chocolate – I am beginning to wonder whether third children should come with sanity warnings!!)….

Over the years that we lived in Bavaria we made Zugszpitze Pilgrimages many times, even spending a night at the very top in a real Iglu on one memorable occasion, complete with late night mountain top sledging in the pitch black with nothing but the stars for company (whilst desperately hoping we weren’t about to career off the side!).  It was all so deafeningly peaceful, if not a little cold.  Please don’t even think about doing this kind of stay without the correct gear, I still think about our Singaporean dinner companions that night in their jeans and trainers and sincerely hope they have thawed out some six years later!

Apart from the Iglu Dorf, there’s no where else you can spend the night.  There’s the odd fondue evening at the SonnAlpinn in Winter, and a few events late in to the evening in the Summer Months, but you can’t stay over…  Once upon a time there was a hotel perched directly beneath the summit of the Zugspitze, which enjoyed boom times once skiing became uber fashionable in the 50’s.  Tragically it was partially destroyed by an avalanche one warm Spring morning in 1965.  10 people were killed and 80 more injured.    Nowadays you can spot the re purposed building in its updated modern state.  It’s home to a Meteorological Observatory providing valuable research in to climate change…   I think the proof is already there that we shouldn’t mess with Mother Nature…

You might think the cost of a Zugspitze pass a little pricey at €60 (you can get the train up and the cable car back down, or the cable car both ways, the price is the same – one ticket covers all!), but if you are going to spend the whole day at the top, then I don’t think it’s too much, especially for these views…   If you really don’t want to pay that kind of money, then just drive a little further up the road and come up on the Austrian side, this isn’t Austria’s tallest mountain after all!!

And after a day appreciating the views, chucking ourselves down mountains and soaking up a good deal of vitamin D (whilst enjoying an accidentally ordered hot chocolate with rum.  I had thought the waiter was messing around with his suggestion) it was time to go back down to earth.

As the cable car came to a stop and we dangled high above the frozen Eibsee for those few minutes, and once I had reined in my three-year old with his wandering hands, the part of my brain that panics at such things  began to taunt me with possible horrendous scenarios, luckily the rational part of my brain answered with “well at least it would be somewhere you loved” (we were on the move again minutes later thankfully!)…

Revisiting the Zugspitze was a real highlight of our Garmisch trip.  It was lovely to introduce it to our smallest mountain conqueror.

I am sure it won’t be long until we are back again…