Mayrwipfel

Initially, we planned another bivouac tour somewhere in the mountains, but the weather report turned out to be really bad, with rain and high winds. But sitting at home? Nope. We decided to hike up the Mayrwipfel to do at least some physical activity, and were surprised by the beauty up there.
And I'm highly motivated to do some physical training right now since I've applied for overnight backcountry/wilderness permits in Yosemite National Park, CA. I will have to carry EVERYTHING on my own there... tent, stove, food, bear canister, basic climbing gear... so I've even packed my bag with some extra kilos this time!

Xeis (Gesäuse)

It had been very warm recently, and we tried several times to find some ice for ice climbing... but all water ice is gone now. So we wanted to summit a couple of peaks around, but we had a very high danger of avalanches, making any risky mountain hikes to very dangerous adventures... although we had the brightest sunshine since weeks
. After our summit-less trial of hiking up Dürrenstein we really needed to get out again. On the Dürrenstein tour, we faced massively wet and heavy snow, had to climb over dozens of ground avalanches and slept in a wet bivouac before turning around with reaching the summit on the next day. Frustrating.

Instead, we wanted at least to train a bit for the mountaineering and glacier tours that we want to do in summer and hiked up to Lahngang and to the Spielkogel via Johnsbach and Mödlinger Hütte. The snow was quite good in the cool shadow, but very, very wet and heavy where the sun had already been. Good cardiovascular training, though.