Extra Tag - Bonus

So, that was actually our last day. It was originally planned for relaxation, but that would have been a shame. The weather was okay in the morning, so we set off at 9:30 after a great breakfast. We were heading up to Rosskopf. It was already steep right next to the hotel, and it got even steeper. After 2.5 hours of hiking through forests and meadows, we reached the mountain station of the cable car, which we could have taken 😬. So, we only managed to hike 6 km with an elevation gain of 900 meters by noon. It was really steep and exhausting, and both of us said that we definitely would not walk down.

At the top, we found the Dolomieu path, which leads to 6 alpine pastures. We took a break at the first one after 30 minutes and had a South Tyrolean specialty, Graukäse (a type of cheese). Delicious 😋.

Then it started raining heavily, but that didn't stop us from continuing our hike. However, the landlady recommended that we only hike to the Vallming Alm and then back because it was supposed to rain further. The path was initially uphill again, but very beautiful. There were meadows with cows wearing bells, very idyllic.

When we were close to the alpine hut after an hour, we unfortunately encountered a problem. There was a cow standing in the middle of the narrow path, and Barbara immediately recognized from its look that it must be a mean bull. She definitely did not want to walk past it. There was no other path. So we walked back a bit hoping that it would move out of the way. But it didn't. On the contrary, it started following us.

Because I couldn't think of anything else, I called the alpine hut. They were very surprised. They insisted that we should definitely walk past it, as all the cows were harmless. So, we did as they said. As we passed by, we realized that it wasn't a bull.

In the alpine hut, we were greeted by laughing people. Typical city dwellers! Can't tell cows apart from bulls 😩.

It was an old, rustic hut where we ate apple and cherry cakes. Very tasty!

By now, it had stopped raining. So, instead of walking back to the cable car, we continued towards the next hut. The landlady had announced that it would take 2 hours, and from there a cable car would go down. We had expected a leisurely path, but it also went up and down quite a bit. But it was very beautiful! We had to hurry because the cable car only runs until 5 pm.

We reached the station before the cable car at around 4:30 pm. But: at least one person in our hiking group preferred to walk down 😩. So instead of going up to the cable car for a 5-minute ride down, we walked down for an hour, just as steep as in the morning. In the morning, we had said that we would definitely not walk down 😬.

Anyway, we walked down for an hour with sore knees. We took the bus back to Sterzing directly to the hotel.

Today, we hiked another 20 km with 1200 meters of elevation gain (both up and down). Unbelievable!

Now we're done with hiking for now. It was truly sensational! In total, we hiked 193 km with 7568 meters of elevation gain uphill. My watch doesn't measure the downhill, but it will be similar. Not bad for our age 😀.