I had had my eye on these two Via Ferratas for a while, as they are near the flying site of Kossen Austria and we had passed through there several times. On the sunny days we were usually flying though, and these lost out. Today, we had low cloud base and threatening rain, so I thought we might be able to zip through these routes ahead of the storms.
Evidently we were supposed to park in the lot at the bottom of the hill, which would have made the hike up to these routes much longer than the 5 minutes I had planned on. We saw a road and kept lumbering up in our motorhome, eventually ending up in the private lot of a hut. I really didn't want to leave with the rocks in sight! Luckily the owner agreed to let us park there as long as we ate in their restaurant afterwards...so we had two bowls of the best Goulash Soup I'd ever eaten :)
There were two routes, one rated a D (out of a possible hardest F) and one an E, both fairly short. Jim and I scooted up the D pretty quickly, although at that rating we had to pull ourselves up the cable hand over hand at times...nothing easy about that!
The rain still held off, so I quickly went and did the E route just to see how hard it was. And basically it was (at times) smooth vertical rock with cable to climb up on. It didn't seem too bad at first but by the end I was really tired. Jim said it looked like I was flying up it, but all I was trying to do was finish before my arm strength gave out!
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