Autumn is the most controversial season. And sadly romantic, and snotty painful, already cool, but there is no snow. It’s not cold yet, but sunbathing is somehow dumb. Rains, leaves, grayness of the sky, wind, trees of fiery colors. I’m used to such an autumn during the time I lived in St. Petersburg. I got used to the very autumn that Yuri Shevchuk sang.
Not that I would not love this autumn, but by the will of fate, I spent most of the summer in Moscow, in which I would not have experienced the moral fall. In early September, I was fortunate enough to find a couple of weeks of this Indian summer in St. Petersburg, and I wanted to continue it so much that a decision arose to continue it in Austria.
The fog in the forest flows into the nostrils. I don’t want to leave this silence.
In the article The first walk through the autumn Ramsau, I already talked about the sports and tourist motives of a trip to Austria. But in this article I will collect autumn as I discovered for myself. A whole new, different fall of opportunity. When in October you don’t feel like hiding in your apartment from the cold, snuggle up to someone under a rug and drink mulled wine. I want to wake up at 6 in the morning and not return home until it gets dark.
This is exactly what we did throughout the entire period as we were here. An early rise is still dark, breakfast, quick equipment gathering, and departure from Ramsau to the Dachstein massif, which is only 20 minutes from the house or to other nearby destinations.
In autumn, fog lies almost every morning in the lowlands. More precisely, these are clouds, because Ramsau itself is located at an altitude of about 1300 meters above sea level. When you wake up, it seems gray and sad on the street, but this is just an illusion. After all, as soon as you pass the border of the clouds, gorgeous views of the mountain ranges open up to your eyes. And the lowlands are filled with the very clouds that look like milk. And most importantly, the October Sun shines brightly, and here you understand - "here it is, Indian summer."
Here, to a height of about 1700 meters, we climbed almost every morning. Lenya rode on the first lift to the array to conduct a training session. And I ran up the hiking trail that runs along the impregnable cliffs of Dachstein to the Sudenweq shelter to enjoy the morning panorama opening onto southern Austria.
And then, go either home after sitting on a meditation bench or further along the path that rare tourists walk along, wanting to climb via ferrata to the top of the massif, having overcome almost 1000 meters of a drop along steep walls, or to go further beyond the pass where their path leads .
One fine day, I decided to run a full route and see what was behind that pass, and did not regret it. The rocky path leading to the pass had practically no slope, so it was a pleasure to run in the complete absence of wind and such warm autumn sunlight. Along the way, snow pits that had not melted from last winter met, which amused me like a peanut. Indeed, a banal 2x2 meter snow hat pleased me as sincerely as a child a bag of chocolates under a Christmas tree for the new year.
Climbing the pass, I again felt like a part of the wild nature, which was not so far from civilization, but this does not prevent the reindeer herds from walking and jumping along the local slopes without any fear of tourists, even those who run here, like me . Frankly, if I put on small horns and rode along with them, I think I would have taken root in their herd.
Frankly, the higher in the mountains, the less you feel the breath of autumn. Physical activity and a constant sun creates a real July at an altitude of 2000 meters, so I allowed myself to run in shorts and a T-shirt all the time until I went down to the lowland, where it is already real autumn and limbs are freezing. Yes, and the color palette of flora as it hints. And only the fauna anyway.
The local lowlands, as I said, are almost completely divided between farmers into pastures. Milk and wool are the same main source of income as tourism in these places. Multi-colored burenki playfully graze in still completely green meadows, and their milk, spilled and packed, is in the store. Right there. But more than that, it is the local cows that give milk for Milka chocolate and are the prototypes of the advertising image of the purple cow. After all, this is a local manufacturer, and this Milka is simply heaps here! And her taste is just real real. We ate a couple of tiles a day for sure.
To be continued!