The Ammergau "Director's Cut" route

Published on 2010-11-15 by Michael Stanton

I enjoyed a great hike yesterday, getting the idea from Summitpost here. I headed out in tennis shoes, confident that the recent foehn wind had melted the considerable snowfall from the latter part of October. Parking at the wrong trailhead, I spent 20 annoying minutes walking on the flats outside of Graswang to get to the right place.

As I listened to interesting music, I quite enjoyed the hike up the Kuhalpenbach. After about 500 meters of elevation gain, I reached a road and walked east on it for a while, before leaving it for the hike up to the Hasenjoechl. Now I'd gained the ridge of the "Director's Cut." I would traverse this from this point in a wide clockwise rotation of about 270 degrees back to Graswang, bagging 8 named summits along the way.

It worked really well. I only encountered some tedious sections of snow at the Vorderer Felderkopf. Beyond that it was a beautiful fall day, with plenty of dry, brown grassy slopes. However the wind was quite strong a lot of the time.

I saw my first people below the Geissprungkopf, and then a continue stream of folks. It seems like a lot of people hike the three named summits on the western side of the great arcing ridge.

Back at the car at 2:45 pm, I realized that I could have easily climbed the entire ridge, throwing in the Ochsensitz, Ziegelspitz and Notkarspitze, certainly doable with another 1.5 hours of travel, and a bike shuttle to Ettal for the start. I'll do this next time, having already proposed the name: the "Extended Director's Cut." :D