It took 23 days for déjà vu. On November 25th, the Aussee mountain rescuers last had to go out to accompany a young Berliner who wanted to cross the Totes Gebirge on snowshoes into the valley. He didn’t expect such amounts of snow, he said, following spending three nights in a tent and sleeping bag.
The two snowshoers who made an emergency call on Monday evening were mentally prepared for their adventure and also well equipped. But the day was too short for them.
On Saturday they set off from Hinterstoder to the Prielschutzhaus, spent the night there in the winter room and on Sunday made it across the plateau to the Pühringerhütte. Given the deep winter conditions in snowshoes, this is a remarkable achievement. In the early hours of Monday morning they began the descent to Grundlsee.
The tracking work was laborious and they only made slow progress. Too slow. Because when darkness fell, they lost their way despite using cell phone navigation. Somewhere in between Lahngangseen and Vordernbachalm they found themselves in steep, impassable terrain. The two men, 24 and 26 years old, made an emergency call, but contact with the control center kept breaking off.
“There is no proper cell phone reception there, we just knew that they were stuck in the Vordernbachalm area,” says Markus Raich, operations and local branch manager for the mountain rescue service in Ausseerland. Eight mountain rescuers and an alpine police officer climbed up and were able to quickly locate the lost people using a thermal imaging drone. The mountain rescuers set up a rope railing and brought the snowshoe hikers safely onto the forest road and into the valley with the emergency vehicle.
“It’s just not possible in snowshoes”
Markus Raich now hopes that not all good things come in threes. “A crossing with snowshoes is simply not possible given the length of the day,” he says. In general, the crossing is more for the skis and is best done in spring.
Author
Gabriel Egger
Editor Upper Austria
Gabriel Egger
