Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

July 31, 2025

2396m

Austria

Zirbitzkogel is one of the easier “Ultras” in the eastern Alps and I picked this one as the introduction to the area purely because of the unfavourable weather forecasts. Adam arrived in Vienna in the early morning of the 30th but I didn’t get here until the late afternoon. The forecast for the first week of this trip was quite sad but the 31st was not looking too terribly. I proposed that we should aim to summit Zirbitzkogel in the early morning and then see what the weather would do for the rest of the day. The hike to the summit of Zirbitzkogel and back shouldn’t take more than 3 hours so very possibly we could bag a few more prominent peaks, weather permitting.

We rented a car in the airport but unfortunately they couldn’t extend the rental period to beyond 30 days. We would have to do something about that in the later part of this trip but that’s something to worry about later. After a quick grocery stop in Vienna we were on the road driving SW. The infrastructure in Austria was definitely “good” with lots of tunnels and freeways but not in the same league as Norway. The driving experience was overall quite pleasant and the speed limit was reasonable (or even too fast for my like). Adam told me the culture in Austria is somewhat similar to Germany so that explains why everybody drives so fast. The trail-head camping situation in Austria is complicated as “car camping” is simply not permitted by law, but the real question was the level of enforcement. We decided to take our chances on the first night as we wouldn’t be pulling in until 11 pm. Adam found a hidden spot a few hundred meters beyond the trail-head on a dirt road and we had no issues setting up camp there. I opted to sleep inside the car for simplicity but Adam pitched his tent on the grass. It rained heavily overnight but the morning was nice and dry.

We got up at around 4:30 am but it took a while to get things packed. We drove back to the trail-head and eventually started the day at 6 am, as planned. There’s a hut right at the trail-head and they were about to collect 3 euros for the parking. We however, figured that it’s very unlikely for something to enforce that rule in the early morning hour of a weekday, so proceeded without paying anything. I wouldn’t be able to figure out how to make the payment anyway since I’m a cash person and there’s nobody around. The weather was better than expected with some intermittent high clouds but plenty of sunshine. There’s not much worth documenting about the hike itself. We had downloaded Rob’s GPX track from peakbagger.com and his route was “right on”. About halfway in we broke through the treeline. The terrain and landscape reminded me some of the coastal hikes I did in Norway, or the pictures I’ve seen of Scotland. Higher up the trail became steep but the quality didn’t deteriorate. We made the summit in 1 hour 40 minutes, gaining over 700 m elevation. I wasn’t expecting much from Zirbitzkogel but it delivered more than I thought.

It was chilly and windy up there so after taking in the views we decided to descend. Given the better-than-expected weather we made the decision to check out at least Ameringkogel which is the closest P1000m objective. Because of that we would have to hurry up on the descent. Adam led a blistering pace that in no time we were back to the parking lot. Our round trip time was 2.5 hours and then we quickly drove away.