Eleventh Day
(05/27/2005)

We got up early 7 a.m. as we wanted to see the real mountains. We still had 4-5 hour to get there. The driving is never fun, but finally it was over. We drove to Gosau to the bad and breakfast Dr. Anna’s group stayed at last year. It was awesome, had really nice rooms and sauna.

After getting our rooms we were off to go to the top of Krippenstein. Krippenstein is the highest peak of the Northern limestone Alps.

“Austria’s Northern Alps formed together with the Carpathians, the Southern Alps and the northern Dinarids an up to 500 km wide and up to 700 km long shelf strip at the western Tethys end. Along this as well as other parts of the Tethyan passive margin belts of marine sedimentation were arranged in a characteristic shore parallel fashion. The first and near shore zone was the Keuper-belt as deposition site of hypersaline or extreme shallow marine siliciclastics. Seaward followed broad Dachstein carbonate platforms of flanked by reefs towards open shelf basins. The Dachstein reefs produced large masses of skeletal and non-skeletal carbonate detritus which were deposited mostly along the platform margins and on the attached basin floors. Further offshore only a small amount of periplatform mud reached as reduced sediment supply the pelagic Hallstatt facies belt. The latter now is generally regarded as evidence for the contiguity of an ocean and is used as tool for delineating the Gondwanian margin towards the deep sea of Tethys. “

We drove through Hallstadt to the cable car station. We took a scary but really cool cable car ride up to the top of the mountain…..

When we walked out of the cable car, we could not believe our eyes. There was the most beautiful alpine landscape we have ever seen in front of us. We had the best time ever.

We were walking around taking pictures. After that we found a little restaurant with a large deck area looking at the mountains and had a couple of frosty drinks. We had such a great day about 80 degree sunny, no clouds at all, snow on the mountain…..

After three hours there we started our hike down. We did not take the cable car, but chose to walk. We had the greatest time with beautiful views of the lake Hallstadt. 

After our hike we were really hungry, so we walked around in the beautiful Hallstadt to find a restaurant. We really enjoyed our bed and breakfast that night. We even tried the sauna, and Hayley and Linden were dancing around in a towel for a while.