Falkertsee - Murmelsteig

Our third climbing via Ferrata was in Carinthia. I was looking for different paths which we could do and somehow the name Falkertsee seemed so familiar. And then I remembered I was here before on my 4 days hike a few years ago. The area is called Heidi Alm and is a very touristic area for hiking and skiing.

The Falkert lake is situated at an altitude of 1872 m, and the best part is that you can drive all the way to the lake and start hiking from there. The lake is also part of the Alpe-Adria-Trail. A fantastic trail starting in Großglockner (the highest mountain in Austria), passing through the mountains in Styria, Carinthia, and Slovenia and ending in Italy. The trail is beautiful, I hiked only parts of it, and I totally enjoyed it. The best part of the trail is that at the end of each day, you will reach one of the mountain huts, where you can have some food and rest.

This time, we were not there for hiking but rather for climbing. From the valley, you can see two peaks, Falkert and opposite from it, is the Rodresnock. Last time when I was here, I only hiked the Rodresnock, so I was happy to climb to Falkert. There are two paths for the via Ferrata, a hard one and an easy one. The easy one was opened in 2018 only, so quite new.

We had some difficulties in finding the start of the via Ferrata, by mistake, we ended up where the hard path starts and had to look for the other one. The beginning of the trail was fine, until we reached a bridge, quite long and not very stable, considering it was fairly windy up there. I was slightly scared because if you fall, there is literally no way to climb back unless you have enough power to pull yourself up. On the other hand, when the bridge moves, it is hard to climb it back up. The other reason why I was scared was D., I knew that he will also have a hard time. The worst part of the bridge is the middle because you have to move your carabiners. The cable where you secure yourself is not continuous. So not only does the bridge not look stable enough, but you have to figure a way to hold yourself and move your carabiners to be able to go further. I went first and tried my best to pass as quickly as possible, and once I was done, D. started. I was worried, but even though he took a bit longer, he managed. I was really proud, knowing that climbing is harder for him due to his Acrophobia. Although we did fine on this climbing, we tried to avoid any via Ferrata with bridges on our next climbing adventures, unless the bridges were small.