The Dachstein - King of the Salzkammergut

The proudest showpiece of the Northern Limestone Alps

Between two schnapps, an old mountain guide rummages through his Dachstein memories during an evening chat at the Simonyhütte. "The crevasse was three meters deep and I had already tried to get out of it for five hours!" Everyone listens intently. "I was all alone, no one could help me. The ice wall was so steep and slippery that I couldn't possibly get up. So I screamed for help, but no one heard me. Now it's dark too. I have never felt my hands and my feet..."

At some point, the listener thinks, the turn for the better must come, otherwise he would no longer be sitting there, the courageous man who had to endure this adventure. But it doesn't come, the happy ending of this story. The mountain guide talks cheerfully, he embellishes every detail, but he comes and does not get to the heart of the matter. Until someone in the audience loses patience and asks: "So how were you saved?"

"Saved?" the question comes back in amazement. "Nobody saved me. But I remembered that there is a leader at the Simonyhütte. I just got them then...!" You can't believe everything mountain guides say.

However, a ladder - and this finally brings us to the serious part of the Dachstein chapter - has actually played a role in the history of the Dachstein. Long before the Simonyhütte was built, the man whose name it bears had a wooden ladder erected at the Dachstein-Randkluft. Sometimes this place, where there is often a dangerous crevasses between the Hallstatt Glacier and the steep rock of the northeast flank of the Hoher Dachstein, is completely impassable. When translating the chasm, a ladder was therefore used, which was later kept at the Dachsteinwarte and always had to be brought from there.

In 1878, one year after the opening of the Simonyhütte, a rock ascent over the Dachstein shoulder was created with iron pins and ship's ropes to avoid the Randkluft. If you want to climb the Dachstein today, you can do so more comfortably than on the classic approach route from Hallstatt via the Simonyhütte and the Hallstatt Glacier. Nevertheless, with a thousand holidaymakers who rave about the fact that they have been to the Dachstein, you should doubt 999 times. Most tourists who have boarded one of the gondolas of the Dachstein cable cars, dine in one of the mountain restaurants and then soak up a glacier tan in a deck chair declare with a clear conscience: We were on the Dachstein! Aren't we unfair. This is not so incorrect.

Because the Dachstein massif also includes the mountains that can be reached by cable car: The Schönbergalm (starting point for ice and mammoth caves), the Krippenstein, the Gjaidalm, the Zwieselalm, the Hunerkogel. With a laughing and a crying eye, the Austrian notes the development of the Dachstein by the cable cars. Mass tourism in the high mountains, some sigh. A country like Austria simply cannot afford not to take advantage of the opportunities offered by tourism, others argue. King Dachstein smiles at this dispute. There is room for everyone in his kingdom: for the summiteers and low-shoe tourists, climbing acrobats and hiking rats, loneliness fanatics and postcard writers. None of the many peaks and ridges, pinnacles and jagged peaks of the Dachstein Mountains is unconquered. However, this does not mean that the Dachstein has lost any of its grandeur.

If you are looking for solitude, you can find it in the infinity of the Dachstein massif. Whether you want to climb the Dachstein with crampons and ice axe or whether you look at it through the window of a mountain restaurant, the Dachstein remains in our century what it was for the first Dachstein pioneers: the proudest showpiece of the Northern Limestone Alps. Upper Austria's most beautiful mountain is also Upper Austria's highest mountain. However, scholars and tourists argue about its exact amount.

The figures vary between 2993 and 3005. Some justify this with the different levels of the seas from which the measurements were taken, others do not bother with justifications at all and speak briefly of the "three-thousand-metre". For the Dachstein town of Hallstatt, however, the three-thousand-metre peak remains invisible. If you want to marvel at the proudest showpiece of the Northern Limestone Alps, you have to go to one of the neighboring mountains or to one of the places that are further away from the Dachstein than Hallstatt.

For the people of Hallstatt, however, the Dachstein is not only the mountain that lies in their municipal area. It is the mountain that brought the first tourists to Hallstatt; from Hallstatt the Dachstein was developed. For generations, the people of Hallstatt have been fatefully connected with the Dachstein. Almost every family in Hallstatt has a mountain guide, a mountain rescuer or at least a mountaineer. And in the taverns, it is not the TV crime dramas of the previous evening that are discussed, but the experiences and adventures with the Dachstein. The stories told here are also true. Where every listener knows the Dachstein just as well as the narrator, mountaineering Latin stops. Many of these men have risked their lives ten, twenty, even fifty times to save the lives of others.

The death march on Good Friday

And the easier it becomes to get to the Dachstein, the more its dangers are underestimated. It is no coincidence that the saddest chapter in the history of the Dachstein was not written at the time of the first ascent, but in the second half of the twentieth century. Ten children and three teachers lost their lives on Good Friday in 1954 because the dangers of the mountains were underestimated, because they ignored the fact that the high mountains were unsuitable for a fitness march.

Hardly anyone who looks at the Dachstein from the cable car station or from one of the safe hiking trails has an idea of the size of this area. A recent report: Although fresh snow had fallen, two families, including four children, wanted to cross the Dachstein glacier on skis. "Only the fact that it had stopped snowing and the night was starry made it possible for the skiers to reach a refuge unharmed at three o'clock in the morning yesterday after a march of more than 16 hours," the newspapers said.

If someone doesn't know what he can trust, it's not the Dachstein's fault. The Dachstein massif has tours of all levels of difficulty in its repertoire. Comfortable and completely safe hiking trails, glacier crossings, climbing, day marches.

There are more than two thousand climbs, was not only calculated, but also tried. Who would have dreamed of this in the last century, when the conquest of the Alps began everywhere and the Dachstein also challenged the bold mountain pioneers? Some considered an ascent of the Dachstein impossible.

Not just any lowlanders, but men with mountain experience. The most prominent of the pessimists was Franz Joachim Ritter von Kleyle, the constant mountain companion of the successful alpinist Archduke Johann. In 1810, i.e. at a time when Mont Blanc and Großglockner, Watzmann and Ortler had long since been conquered, he prophesied that all attempts to climb the Dachstein "will probably always fail, because even where the shape of the mountains does not put an obstacle in the way, the Eilklüfte make the ascent too dangerous".

The first copywriter for the Salzkammergut

Quite different from this privy councillor Franz Joachim Ritter von Kleyle, the physician, botanist and alpine writer Joseph August Schultes, who was almost the same age and travelled through Upper Austria for fourteen years and wrote amusing reports about it. As you may remember from the previous chapters, he was in Hallstatt several times and also undertook an "excursion to the Glätscher on the Dachsteine" as early as 1804. She has left him with "indelible images". Finally, the enthusiasm of this first copywriter for the Salzkammergut culminates in a prophetic sentence: "I embrace you, and all those who climb the Dachstein after me, in spirit!"

Archduke Johann wanted to reach the summit

It was not until seven years later that Archduke Johann considered "with the greatest attention this highly interesting mountain massif" and again six years later "at the instigation of His Imperial Highness, serious preparations were made to climb the summit, since he himself then intended to make this ascent."

First ascent on your own

However, it was not His Imperial Highness who was the first to stand on the summit of the Hoher Dachstein, but a farmer and mountain guide from Filzmoos: In 1832, Peter Gappmayr, who was 43 years old at the time, was the first to reach the Dachstein summit on his own via the Gosa Glacier.

The Dachstein Caves

Much later than the heights, the depths in the Dachstein Mountains were discovered, where today hundreds of thousands of people are drawn every year. Of the approximately 250 Dachstein caves, the enormous extent of which has still not been fully explored, three are accessible by convenient paths. The majority of visitors flock to the Dachstein Giant Ice Cave are sought-after hiking destinations. In 1910, a railroad worker from Linz (Georg Lahner) had awakened the subterranean fairytale world of the Dachstein from its slumber. None of the Dachstein pioneers is as alive in the consciousness of the population as Friedrich Simony (1813 to 1896). The Cave Worlds Today - Read more...

Friedrich Simony and the Dachstein

Mir Recht, the oldest and most famous Dachsteinhütte bears his name. On the way from Hallstatt to the Wiesberghaus and the Simonyhütte, a simple monument commemorates this man, who came to Hallstatt in 1840 and whose life from then on remained forever connected with Hallstatt and the Dachstein. He has expanded the paths and put the summit in iron fetters. In 1842 he was the first to climb the Dachstein in winter, in the following summer he had the ambition to spend a night on the Dachstein summit - and stayed another night a week later, this time all alone.

Adalbert Stifter's "Rock Crystal"

It was Simony who drew Adalbert Stifter's attention to the Dachstein and thus gave rise to the story "Bergkristell", with which the Dachstein landscape gained literary world renown. "The Dachstein area, a geographical character picture from the Austrian Northern Alps, illustrated and described according to his own photographic and freehand drawings by Dr. Friedrich Simony, k. k. Hofrat and em. University Professor" is the title of the monumental work about the Dachstein, completed one year before Simony's death. Here, on the Dachstein, Simony indulged in "the delight of a sunset on the Läderdominating Prince of the Rocks", here he wished "to surrender to the deceptive play of the air spirits and to defy the whim of the Alpine king". On the Dachstein, even the scientists became romantic poets.

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