As some of you might know, one of our absolute favorite things about living in Munich (and therefore, in close proximity to the Alps) is the hütte culture. Germans - and Germanic cultures like Switzerland, Austria, and northern Italy, are avid outdoors people. Importantly, though, they are also talented engineers and dedicated beer enthusiasts. So they've developed this incredible concept that combines all three of these things: the mountain huts (hütte auf Deutsch).

Basically, imagine a hiking trail in the middle of the biggest Alps-y mountains you can imagine. Then imagine a log cabin, then imagine that log cabin has picnic benches perfectly perched to soak up the sun and views, a full kitchen serving warm and usually hyper-local food, a bar with cold bier, water dishes for dogs, and sometimes even rooms to sleep. And these "cabins" are in the middle of the mountains, often on crazy peaks or on the side of ledges! It's wild and totally blew my mind when I realized just how awesome they are. Some of the hütten are an easy hike from a parking lot; others require ropes and technical climbing skills that Dave and I don't have.

The "thing to do" in the Alps is to schedule a hütte to hütte to hütte trip hiking between them. Since they're hotel-ish and all have food, you only need to carry clothes and personal items - easy backpacking! But the best hütten for these trips book up weeks, if not months, in advance and we never had our schedule together enough to plan that far in advance. It's definitely still on the bucket list, for this European adventure or another in the future. Instead, we did a few overnights at individual hütte (e.g., our Thanksgiving post), but mostly, our Grey Goose made it possible to sleep at or near a trailhead and then dayhike or trailrun to the hütte for lunch. Honestly, I can barely imagine a better weekend day.

The Coburger wasn't our first hütte, but a good representation of what such a weekend can look like: in the middle of July, we took the van, stationed her in the lot of a ski resort, and hiked up to Coburger in Austria. It was a little bit of a miracle that we made it; we mistakenly took a more technical route than we intended, but didn't realize until too late. The down hikers wearing helmets and harnesses should have been a clue... Ooops. But we made it. Although, this wasn't the last time we made that mistake - see forthcoming post about The Death March.

Bottom line: hütten will always be one of my favorite things about our time in Europe.

Trailside

Dave and Truff en route to Coburger Hütte

That rope was very necessary

Moments before the very-needed hand holds

En route

Drachensee below Coburger

Beautiful view before the final ascent up to Coburger

Coburger Hütte in sight

Made it!

I ate the horseradish and pickle

Prost!

View from Coburger (look carefully for more hiking routes meandering through the mountains)

Hike back to the car

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The next day, we took a trail run through the Ehrwald-Zugspitze region. The gondola helped us get up to the trails and views quicker, and Truff did great on her first ride.

Truff's first gondola ride!

Sweaty runners