see trail on Wikiloc here !
The weather is cold but a bit overcast today and we set off on foot from the hotel along the creek nearby. We take the scenic road up the valley and hike steadily uphill all the way to the Windeck. We don’t follow a marked tour, but have a good idea of which way we want to go and how far everything is. All the way to the Hauslebauernhof the track is broken in, meaning we can walk in the compacted snow left by previous hikers, however we don’t meet anybody the whole day. We see a lot of animal tracks in the snow, it seems they must use the forest trails as local highways: there are many different kind of tracks following it for a while before heading off into the forest again. We manage to unearth (or rather unsnow) a bench near the farm and have a nut-sugar snack with a cup of hot tea. The road past the farm seems a bit more well-travelled, so we decide to hike straight up the Windeck instead, following a trail that is almost lost beneath more than half a meter of snow. It is so deep that it pushes up our trousers and falls into our hiking boots, so we note this as a lesson learned, fish out the snow and put on gaiters. We now walk over virgin snowfields and tracks, so it’s pretty tiring to break a trail through the snow.
We join a larger road when we’re almost at the top and there we have lunch in a hunter’s lookout. We can’t look out very far, but at least we’re high and pretty dry, though there’s a risk of snow falling from the firs because of the wind. We’re very satisfied with our new butt-sized isolating mats that protect our backsides from freezing to the wooden bench. After lunch we continue around the Windeck top, trying to find a nice road down back to Hinterzarten. We have to turn back when it turns out that when one specific road stops on the map, it also stops in actuality and there’s no way down the hillside, but a bit further on we follow a cross country ski trail down. It disappears halfway down the slope, so we use the GPS to aim for the road we want to reach and freewheel it. Unfortunately, we come out of the woods halfway up a ski slope, with the road way down below, so we cross the steep slope – not in use today, luckily – and find our way down following trail indicators and sense of direction. When we come out at the end of the ski slope it’s really foggy, so we take a general aim on a house presumably connected by a local road and make our way further down. We follow the local roads cleared of snow all the way to the creek trail at the back of the hotel. Back around three thirty, we take a long hot shower to warm up again and keep busy until six when it’s time for dinner. I sort the pictures of the day, we read, we choose our next hike.
Febe writes 