Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

August 10, 2025

3767m

Tyrol, Austria

Wildspitze in Tyrol is the 2nd highest peak in Austria as well as the 4th most prominent in the entire Alps, making it one of the more sought after objectives in the region. There are quite a few approaches and all require some degree of glacier travel. The most commonly used approach on peakbagger.com seems to be the southern one from Vent mostly because the glacier crossing is the shortest. This route does add some via ferrata climbing to access the upper glacier, and requires about 1700 m elevation gain. Those who stay in Breslauer Hütte can take the cable lift shaving off half of the elevation gain, but the opening hour of the said lift is too late for day-trippers. Adam and I agreed to do most, if not all of the objectives as single-day pushes so we would have to make the full ascent from the valley bottom.

There was a week-long weather window allowing us to choose some of the bigger objectives and the plan was to do Wildspitze the day after Hoher Dachstein. This required more than 6 hours of driving. Google Map directed us through Salzburg and part of the southern Germany before going south towards Innsbruck. The traffic situation wasn’t too bad except for the area around Salzburg, but this detour into Germany did add some time. We eventually turned onto the smaller roads heading towards the village of Vent, and we did find a perfect camping spot on a spur road about 10 minutes from Vent. The next morning we woke up at around 2:30 am as I was concerned about the condition on the glacier due to the heat wave. I also noticed a trail heading up from Rofen a few kilometers farther up the road than Vent, so we drove there to start the day. The parking area was very limited but we did get the vehicle parked, and the trail did appear to be “reasonable”. This way we would shorten the elevation gain by more than 100 m.

The start of the trail was a bit overgrown but the quality quickly improved. We made steady work up the endless switchbacks under the full moon, and were eventually joined by some other day-trippers coming up from the longer, more standard way. It was still dark when we got to the hut and a lot of the climbers in the hut hadn’t even started their ascent. The trail beyond the hut deteriorated quickly into some boulder fields that even with a GPX track we still lost the trail several times. The horizon was finally bright enough to not need to use the head-lamps anymore so we simply plodded through the boulder fields and picked up the trail again on the far side. Meanwhile we passed a soloist who was also “lost” in the boulders. There’s one sizeable creek crossing so we took a break there loading up the water bottles and then resumed the grunt into the upper valley heading towards the via ferrata climbing. The people on this mountain were all reasonably fast that we weren’t much faster overall. The area under Mitterkarjoch was actually a rock-covered glacier so the footings were very loose, but we were able to stay on a reasonably defined path for the entire way.

I was anticipating the ferrata to be “easy” but it didn’t appear to be that way, so I ditched the trail runners and donned the mountaineering boots. Right off the bat we had to ascend a snow slope and the slope angle was about 35-40 degrees. I did so without ice axe nor crampons and was fine. Higher up we merged onto the ferrata with mostly “Grade B” climbing but one spot was particularly tough with some busted footholds. The result was several vertical-to-overhanging pull-up moves with considerable amount of exposure. We all rappelled that pitch on the descent a few hours later. The upper section of the ferrata wasn’t difficult but was very exposed. We caught up to a group-of-two on the edge of the glacier and one of them was actually from Alberta, Canada but was currently living and working in Munich, Germany. Adam and I were quicker on the transitions so we started the crossing of the glacier. We still had 300 m elevation gain left. Contrary to my expectation, there was a decent overnight freeze that the condition was actually perfect. We simply followed the “highway” of tracks to the SW Ridge and then ditched the rope and crampons there. There wasn’t any notable crossing of crevasses. The final scramble up the SW Ridge was mostly dry with a few 3rd class moves near the top, and we were one of the earliest summitters of that day.

A lot of the climbers were doing some sort of a traverse as we were joined by at least 10 summitters but few of them were descending the same way. Adam and I were only aware of this one route so we must go down the same way. In no time we were back at the glacier, and the condition was still holding well for our descent. We did punch through the crust a few times near the finish line so mostly stayed in the tracks. To descend the ferrata I went down ahead to set up the aforementioned rappel, and Adam and the Albertan climber as well as his partner all followed afterwards. We then carefully down-climbed the lower chossy zone. Due to rockfall concern I carried my ditched trail runners and food for a long ways down before stopping for the long break transitioning. The rest of the descent was rather uneventful but was very tiring and boring. We did stop briefly at the hut but didn’t purchase anything. Our round trip time was 8 hours 45 minutes including all of the stops. While climbing Wildspitze I was communicating with Vlad who happened to be in Innsbruck area. The original plan was to head down south to climb Marmolada on the next day but I changed my mind. Instead, I would do Zugspitze with Vlad on the following day and do Marmolada the day after.