Happy, the friendly frog

Happy New Year to all my friends and followers!
The weather wasn't really good at the beginning of the year, but of course we wanted to start the new year with a mountain tour.
We started in a shower of sleet, but after a while the weather got a little better. We climbed Mt. Stuhlkopf („Stuhl“ means „chair“) and at the summit there was actually a real chair next to the usual cross.
There was no view from the chair because the summit was wooded, but 50m further on there was a bench at a nice viewpoint. And the sun even came out for a moment.

The impact of the storm and the heavy rain from some weeks ago can still be seen everywhere:
Fallen trees on the paths, broken telephone lines and earth slides. It is often very difficult to reach the summits.
Today Nilpferd even forgot to take a photo of me at the summit, but I swear I was at the top.

Mt. Hochgern is a very popular destination, but for us it‘s too crowded there. Next to it there is Mt. Zwölferspitz and because the path is not signposted or marked, it is very quiet up there.
We just met 3 black grouses.
These birds are very rare and threatened with extinction. They crossed our path about 20 meters in front of us and we stopped and kept very quiet.
They were too far away for a real good photo, but we watched them for about 10 minutes and continued our hike when they were out of sight.

The cache at the summit was supposed to be easy to find because it was hidden right next to the cross.
However during the last storm, the cross broke down and the cross was placed somewhere into a hole in the rock.
But we have found a place where it probably stood and Nilperd took his avalanche shovel and shoveled hard, but there was no cache. When we had already given up, we found another spot that also could have been the foundation of the cross. And there was the cache easy to reach and it was not even covered with snow.
But Nilpferd supposedly enjoys shoveling snow.

In May we visited a museum where we learned that in earlier centuries brine (salt water) was pumped over more than 100 kilometers via a pipeline from the Alps to the big cities where the water then was heated to extract salt from it.
Today we followed such a pipeline in the mountains. At one point, a bridge led over a small canyon. The metal construction of the bridge and the pipeline are rusty but still in good condition. But all the wood has been rotted since a long time.
It was very exciting to balance across the bridge on the remaining narrow steel girders.

I am surprised that so much effort was made to transport salty water. In Bavaria I had expected a pipeline for beer.

We used the perfect weather today before it might only rain until the end of the year.
We've climbed Mt. Simetsberg (1840m above sea level) close to Lake Walchensee several times before, but it's really a beautiful hike in winter and we enjoyed it again today.
There must have been hikers ahead of us who didn't have snowshoes. We have seen the holes in the snow where they have sunk half a meter and sometimes even more into the snow. With our snowshoes however it was much more comfortable.
But we again had the problem that many trees broke down a few weeks ago under the heavy snow load and now are lying on the path.