Note the free climbers
This was my fifth (as far as I recall) climb of beautiful mount Alpspitze (2628 m); my first one was at the age of 12 or so.
This time we did most of the tour by bike, starting from the cable car station just west of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. I'm not a passionate mountain biker, and on the way up I was a bit disappointed that we took about as much time as when going by foot at good pace, but what convinced me was that on the way down we saved a lot of time (and our knees), taking only half an hour from Hochalm to the trailhead. Similar timing is of course possible with ski mountaineering, see e.g. a late winter ascent to the nearby Kreuzjoch a year before.
On the way up we left the bikes just below the entry to Schöngänge (a short easy via ferrata on the East flank), then did the 'classic' climbing loop via Osterfelderkopf, up the famous (non-exposed and overly safeguarded ) North face ferrata, and down the East slope and Schöngänge.
Panoramas by Siesei. The GPS track of our route can be viewed on Trailguru including various statistics and on Google Maps including the photos even without installing Google Earth.
| Approach | | | | |
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| Towards Kreuzeck | | | | |
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| Towards Hochalm | | | | |
| Towards Osterfelderkopf | | | | |
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| Towards Via Ferrata | Note the free climbers | | | |
| On the Via Ferrata | | | | |
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| Views of Zugspitze | | | | |
| Summit | | | | |
| Descent towards Bernardeinspitze | | | | |
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| Schöngänge, Hochalm | | | | |
| Final descent | | | ||