Snowy Stanser Joch Hike

Published on 2024-5-2 by Michael Stanton

I hiked up from Stans, following the bee-line straight from town up to the little broken-down house 1400 meters up the slope. I listened to interesting podcasts, especially one about the archeology of Sodom. Fascinating! It seems that God rained hellfire on the city as the Bible states. What a strange story that is...I think a mark of it's truth is the rather poor behavior of Lot, who, rather than turning over the angels to the wicked men of the city "so that we may know them," was happy to turn over his virgin daughters to them. What the heck? It is a dreamlike story (a very bad dream). It is good to have a God who reaches into the world to correct us, I am certain.

Anyway, my feet became cold on the march to the summit in recent and sometimes knee-deep snow. Bad weather was brewing to the west. I decided to continue along the ridge to the east and come down to Jenbach. This went well enough for a while, but gosh, the toes were getting cold. I should have worn thicker socks! Finally I reached a little hunting stand where I could leave the ridge to the north where I saw tantalizing dry ground below at the Heiterlahn Alm. I wished for an ice axe as I traversed steep slopes in the snow. In total I made 4 traverses to stay on the trail which cunningly avoided steep ground amid latschen bushes, scruffy cliffs and smallish trees. I had old tracks of a beast to follow (probably Gämse). Near the bottom, I had to reclimb because I'd left the trail and ended up, predictably enough in a miserable grove of latschen and rotting snow. I limped on frozen feet to the Hochleger at the Alm, squeezed the water out of my socks and set to drying and warming them. Whew!

Hochleger Alm

Below the Alm, steep trail and many Gämse around got me down to the Rödelhüttenweg. Great views of the Rofan Mountains from here. I walked through Jenbach, then another 6 kilometers back to my car in Stans. I rested aching feet and lay on the grass for a while at the Tratzberg castle.

An interesting, varied day -- and a lesson on the importance of good, thick socks for walking in snow in trail runners! 1600 meters up/down and about 20 kilometers.

A view of the Rofan Mountains on the way down