Goldeck

July 31, 2025

2142m

Austria

Goldeck is a popular touristy summit but only boasts over 400 m prominence, so this was not on the original itinerary of the trip as the “line” we drew for this European trip was at least 600 m prominence. Adam and I ended up bagging it purely by mistake. The original plan was the P1300m Mirnock after completing Ameringkogel and I let Google Map direct us to the trail-head which is labelled “Wieser Hütte” on the Gaia map. The driving direction and time seemed reasonable so I didn’t make any additional checking, and I was also not driving at the moment. Instead, I was too tired to even stay awake. I woke up at a toll booth and didn’t bother to check anything neither as the road to Mirnock’s trail-head is supposed to be a toll road as well, but we quickly realized the mistake. This is another Wieser Hütte. It’s in the same range as the P1000m Latschur but the location of this hut only makes sense if we were to do Goldeck. This peak still boasts some prominence and we had already paid 15 euros for the toll road, so we had to do it.

I was glad we ended up being here as the views were better than Mirnock and the ascent was also supposed to be shorter. We only had a bit more than 250 m elevation gain to deal with, but we made the “ascent” even shorter by driving up the private road all the way to Panoramahütte. As we were about to gear up for the hike a shutte van came down revealing the gate was simply “dummy locked”. A few minutes later we decided to open that gate ourselves and slowly drove ourselves up. The road was unpaved but not too bad for the rental 2WD. I thought someone would definitely give us some hard time but nobody seemed to be bothered. There weren’t too many people around anyway. By parking at this uppermost parking lot we only had 20 vertical meters to gain, so didn’t even bother to don hiking cloths. This is a touristy summit so as expected, the views were excellent towards all directions. There were however, too many infrastructures on the upper mountain so the panoramic views were kind of blocked.

A view of the north face of Staff from the (supposedly illegal) drive-up

Eckwand and Latschur from where we parked the vehicle

Mirnock is the rounded bump in the background

The private dirt road with a passing storm cell, looking south

Monte Màngart to the south is a peak with over 1000 m prominence

Adam and I on the summit of Goldeck with Lake Millstatt valley behind

Not doing much lingering we quickly made our way down to the parked vehicle and drove away before anybody realizing our presence. I was 100% sure that we weren’t supposed to drive up there, but in the middle of an intense month-long peakbagging mission it was important to save every bits of energy wherever possible. There was another van descending while we drove ourselves up so we wondered if they would have locked the gate. We weren’t far from the lower, Wiesser Hütte so we could walk there to ask for help (and pay some hefty fines), if needed. To our great relief the gate was still “dummy locked” so we got ourselves out as quickly as we humanly could, relocked the gate and drove towards Gerlitzen, the final objective of this day which was also supposed to be a drive-up “ascent”.