The Austrian Alps

Slow but steady while seeing the `undiscovered' Tyrol

Author: By Shirley Elder, Globe Correspondent

Date: SUNDAY, August 2, 1998

Page: M1

Section: Travel

Along the way, Stefan paused at a small, level spot and pointed with pride to the long, curvy trail we had just come up. How easy it is. How far we've come. ``It doesn't matter how fast you go,'' he said. ``Being in the mountains is its own reward.'' He waved his hand toward a distant mountainside. The trail was barely visible across a broad field of pale dolomite scree. It's just over that hill.

Indeed. Over the hill. How appropriate. Because we are -- if nothing else -- over the hill. We not only are part of an informal New Hampshire group known as the Over the Hill Hikers, we also fit those cliches about age, those cute birthday cards that say: ``You're not over the hill, you're just . . .,'' etc.

We're kind of living proof that you don't have to be under 30 to enjoy some pretty strenuous hiking. On this trip, our group of 26 hikers ranged from ages 57 to 80. The overall average was 70.2 years old. One of our guides said he was inspired to go home and tell his mother-in-law to get off her couch and onto the trail.

The bells of St. Oswald's woke us at 7 a.m. on our first day in Austria. We counted 66 gongs. No tune. Just gong-gong, gong-gong. The sound came from a lovely old Catholic church across the street from our Hotel Boglerhof in the small village of Alpbach. We were there for six nights, and then on to Fulpmes for six more.

This trip emerged from a casual suggestion that we ought to take a trip to Europe sometime. Many Over-the-Hillers had bagged all 48 of New Hampshire's 4,000-footers, plus some in Vermont, Maine, and New York. New challenges beckoned.

We talked with our own nearby celebrity-athlete, Penny Pitou, two-time Olympic silver medalist now leading ski and hiking trips from her travel agency in Laconia. Pitou had tried office work, and found it lacking. ``I don't like being inside,'' she said. ``I like being outside. All my life, exercise had been part of my lifestyle. . . . I said something has to change here.''

The change carried Pitou to Europe over and over. For 15 years now, she has been leading skiers and hikers to high places, mostly in the Alps. Ours was her first group of what can only be called senior citizens. Most are retired, and some are kind of slow by high-mountain standards. Several hike with bum knees and taped ankles.

Austrian guides must have wondered when they first spotted us. Most of us are gray-haired. Lib Crooker's hair is pure white. Guthrie Speers, a retired Presbyterian minister, has a distinctive limp, caused by a car running over his foot. Jocelyn Gutchess has chronic pain in one ankle and sort of hippety-hops to relieve the pressure.

Knees seem to go first. David Stuntz, a former businessman, favored a tender left one; journalist Dick Lyons simply put elastic braces on both knees; Sue Speers and Joan Lovett limped a little but hiked steadily on, refusing to complain; Carolie Martin, her right knee injured in a skiing accident a few years ago, carried an impressive metal brace that she strapped on for going downhill. She's OK going up.

An unusual medical emergency arose one day at lunch when Crooker lost a temporary cap on a front tooth. Fellow hiker Bill Smith, a dentist and ever resourceful, whipped out some extra dental cement he just happened to have in his pack, and using the auger from his Swiss army knife, got the tooth back in working condition.

Pitou took most of these same hikers to Switzerland in 1996. All survived, some taking on the steepest, narrowest paths without a pause. In fact, the trip was such a rousing success that when Austria was mentioned, 27 -- including one nonhiker who went along for the ride --signed up in a day.

Pitou loves Austria, calls it her second home. She speaks German with an Austrian accent. Her first husband, Egon Zimmermann, was on the Austrian Olympic ski team in the 1950s. Austrians greet her as an old friend and make her old friends feel welcome too.

``I feel very much at home in Austria,'' she said. ``I first went over there when I was just 17 (as a ski racer) and now I'm 59, ugh, my god. And for all those years I've been going back. . . . I find the Austrians very mellow people. I like working with them. I trust them.''

The towns Pitou selected for our hikes were well off the beaten path. She gave the trip a title: Undiscovered Tyrol. ``I wanted areas that weren't very well known, so we wouldn't run into a bunch of Americans,'' she said.

As if to prove her right, one Alpbach shopkeeper was delighted to hear we were from the United States. ``We don't have many Americans here,'' she said.

Alpbach is small, population about 2,200, with 500 of them named Moser, including our bus owner-driver, Gabriel Moser. The village is at 3,400-feet elevation, an hour or so drive west-southwest from Salzburg. It was an old copper and silver mining town and virtually inaccessible until 1926, when the first modern road was built.

But even with vehicles snaking through its narrow main street, Alpbach today is hailed for its pure air. In 1993, the town was called ``the most beautiful flowering village in Europe.'' It is surrounded by mountains, their rugged peaks rising several thousand feet from the narrow valley.

Boston seemed a million miles away.

A pattern emerged. Breakfast was at 7:15. By 8:30, we were suited up, collapsible walking sticks in hand, backpacks strapped on, and ready for seven or eight hours of hiking.

Pitou hired two professional mountain guides in each of the two areas we visited. ``Guides are terribly important,'' she said. ``I look for people with patience, who are certified guides, with a good sense of humor, who know something about the flora and fauna but also can talk about other things, politics, the history of the country, like a teacher as well as a guide.''

Trust is a key word, she said. ``I have to trust'' the guide. ``I have to trust that he'll show up. I have to trust that his personality isn't going to change with the weather. I like guides who have respect for the mountains, who aren't crazy.''

At first, Pitou said we would be divided into ``walkers'' and ``hikers.'' But Crooker, who is known as the group's den mother and who has been hiking in the White Mountains 70 or so years, objected. We're all hikers, she said, some just a little slower. So Pitou called us A and B.

The goal was to have A's and B's more or less equal, but numbers fluctuated. The nonhiker, Betty Shinsky, occasionally was joined by one or two others just taking a day off to look around the village. After six or seven days, Alan Simmons and Kiki Rice-Gray complained of chest pains -- a not uncommon problem with high altitude exertion -- and doctors advised them to slow down.

The at-home group hit a peak of 10 one drizzly Sunday when they hired a small Moser bus and went to Tratzberg, a 16th-century castle near Kufstein, and the medieval town of Rattenberg and its famous crystal-cutting school.

That left the B team and its guide, Heinz Schonner, with a long string of 15, which is more than most guides like to guide. Pitou helped by staying at the back with the slowest -- me -- as we hiked through a col or saddle, Hoseljoch, into the next valley. Our destination was Auffach, where an old ski pal of Pitou's now runs a small inn. It was our longest day, 13 miles.

Where possible, Pitou tried to arrange for both A's and B's to hike in the same general area, often meeting for lunch. On one particular mountain, the Gratlspitze, for example, the A's slabbed around the mountain, while the B's went to the 6,263-foot summit, and the two met at a mountainside restaurant, or hut.

Nearly every Austrian summit in this largely Catholic country has a cross and a little book for visitors to sign. The B's bagged six peaks, three each in Alpbach and Fulpmes, shouting ``Berg Heil'' at the top. The guide kissed the women and shook hands with the men.

A-group hikes generally followed lower paths, but did bag one summit, the Wiedersberger Horn, 7,022 feet. On the same day, the B's went up the valley's highest peak, Grosse Galtenberg, at nearly 7,900 feet. That was the only day we packed a lunch. Other times we'd come to a mountain hut for lunch.

Those huts make hiking in the Alps, whether in Switzerland or in Austria, eminently civilized. You can't go more than a couple of hours without bumping into one of them. Most have accommodations and toilets. All serve meals. At one we even were serenaded by a four-piece brass band. Actually, I think they were there for a wedding party, but we enjoyed it, too.

While in Fulpmes at the Hotel Cristall, we took an overnight side trip to one of the better-known huts, the 100-year-old Franz-Senn, named for a Catholic priest who first opened Austrian mountain huts to visitors in the 1800s. Most huts were built by German hiking clubs before World War II, and now are leased to Austrian operators.

The Franz-Senn is on a route of popular hut-to-hut hikes, but we went for just one night, returning to our comfortable four-star hotel in Fulpmes for the rest of the trip. But the hut is quite unlike anything in the White Mountains. It is a three-story hotel with rooms for two and four persons, toilets, hot showers, all kinds of food and drink.

Most of the hikes were quite rugged. Intentionally. A Pitou goal is to challenge people to do more than they think they can. After one particularly difficult day, Stefan said that was the way the mountains were supposed to be: tough, challenging, so you have to think about what you're doing.

In Alpbach, guide Heinz Schonner even greeted his team with tips on hiking in these mountains: theproper uphill stride, how to use rocks to advantage, where to plant hiking poles -- we each had two -- how to run downhill, how to fall.

At Fulpmes, as we set off for Franz-Senn, guide Helli Hagner offered trail-food advice on keeping energy levels high: ``Take a chocolate bar. Eat what you want to. Don't eat what the doctor tells you. Eat what your stomach tells you.''

On the second-to-last night, we sat around a small private dining room, finishing a four-course dinner and mugs of wine. Guthrie Speers suggested we pause and reflect on this extraordinary trip. He said he would remember especially a short, barrel-chested farmer named Georg who gave us mugs of frothy fresh milk -- and then a dollop of schnapps.

Alan Simmons said he enjoyed most a hike to a high saddle between two valleys, clear air and lush green meadows -- ``just sitting and looking around, not having to do anything.'' Mary Hunt talked of a rainy day at Franz-Senn hut when we woke to ice on the ground and climbed a rocky, narrow path high into shifting fog and drizzle. ``I discovered,'' she said, ``it's possible to hike in the rain and enjoy it.''

For Walter Johnson, a happy moment was simply getting off the open double chairlift successfully in the Stubai Valley. He doesn't much like those lifts. Lib Crooker was glad to have bagged another peak, the W. B. Horn. For Spencer Martin, it was food. ``I've enjoyed the nutritional pattern,'' he said. ``Every time we stop we have a little bite to eat.''

Dick Lyons remembered the sight of our guide Stefan ``running like an Indian'' down the long narrow valley at Franz-Senn, emerging from the mist and bringing a message from Pitou for the slower group to start down the mountain.

``I see people enjoying themselves, and putting up with little inconveniences that might bug them at home,'' Pitou said later. ``So when people ooh and aah, I like that very much. It means people are responding. They're not just doing a walk-through. . . . This group gels.''