Wieseralm

On top

To celebrate the Italian mid-summer fest of Ferragosto, this year, I and my bicycle rides companion have decided to climb the "Mountain of Graz": the Schoeckl. The steps of nearly 400 meters each. A real challenge for one of my age and ... weigh. Well. It went smoothly, without much suffering.

The untamed mountain

24%

There are moments when photography is just an excuse.

In the middle of nowhere

En route

... to reach the snow line.

En route

... to reach the snow line.

Looking for the first snow

One of my last chances, this year, to try a new road, to go somewhere out of my common tracks along the valley of the Mur river. Exploring puts aside the fatigue. The wish to discover how it is, the new scenarios, compared to the track you created on the map, is stronger that the hurdles and the slopes.

On top

Now that I'm back home and not in such bad physical conditions as I initially feared, I can tell it and show the proof. I didn't expect to go that far and high, today. It's been raining hardly for two days and my expectations, while leaving my house for this afternoon tour, were not very high. Still, after renouncing the idea on a big tour that I'm going to make, sooner or later, over the mountains north-west of Graz, I passed, one after another, some milestones, each time deciding to go forth. Eventually, as the air had already gotten thinner and colder, I came to an elbow bent, on the road crossing the valley of Tyrnau, where I had to take a decision standing in front of a road sign indicating a slope higher than 14%.

And I went on, till I reached the top.

The world from above

Wherever I point my sight.

1020 s.l.m.

And I won't go any farther.

I got on top of the highest point reachable by bicycle in the nearby hills, this morning. The last hundreds of meters have been sufficiently steep and painful to let me think about turning the handlebar and going downhill on the same road I just climbed. But I was firm with myself and insisted, even stopping once to breathe in a silence so deep to ear my heart beating hard inside, till I reached the bent where the road flattens and you can feel your legs rolling free.

And ... here.

I'm here.

Zero degree

Awakenings

Eventually, I had to drive southbound, over the Italian border, to find signs of change. It was sufficient to cross the mountain pass called Packsattel, between Steiermark and Carinthia, to appreciate a real change of season.

Last Saturday, I drove my family to Udine, where they got on a fast train to Rome, to reach our families for some days before Easter. On my way back to Graz, I stopped one day in Tolmezzo, to meet with friends and fill up my car with goods I'm not able to find few kilometers north, crossed the national border. So, on Sunday morning, having one hour to roam around, I headed to a medieval tower standing on a rock, one hundred meters over the small town, along a steep path through the wood. And there I discovered the first sings of awakenings.

There, where the sun sets

Never trust the navigators, you might turn nostalgic.

Last afternoon, on our way back home, after a day spent in Althofen among young fencers from all the nations that color the maps of this corner of Europe, in the attempt to avoid the long queues on the Austrian highway due to the endless maintenance works, we opted to follow the instructions of both the car and the mobile navigation software. Having left at our shoulders the small industrial town north of Klagenfurt, in just a handful of minutes we have found ourselves on a steep, serpentine-like road in the middle of the Carinthians mountains. I knew the route was definitely shorter than looping around the massif using the highway. What I couldn't estimate before was the time to drive along such a road, surrounded by walls of snow at nearly half the speed the navigators thought I would go. To make things a bit more complicate there were the breathtaking wilderness and the views behind each bend of the road. Eventually, we had to stop.

As we got on the highest point of the track, not far from a local ski station, we parked our car on a melting icy slab and got off to take some snapshots. In font of us there was a marvelous panorama of the west lands, were the sun was about to sink and there I spotted the line of the Alps. Which made me think of Italy and the winter sunsets of the sea line of the horizon.