Happy, the friendly frog

Before the cable car to Mt. Herzogstand starts operating again tomorrow, we took the opportunity today to be at the summit without the masses of people.
We knew that there was still snow up there, but we hadn't expected that there is so much.
Nilpferd again and again sank up to its knees in the snow. The last section to the summit, which normally takes 20 minutes, took us 1 hour.
But we were all alone at the summit for a whole hour.

We had already discovered the "summit" (actually just a large boulder) in the Brauneck ski area with the two antennas on top many years ago and had already seen that there was a steel cable as an aid for the ascent.
Although Nilpferd had spent almost his entire working life with communications technology, he was unable to explain the purpose of the antennas at that time.
But now there is a cache right next to the antennas and we made another attempt.
The antenna cables led to a metal box at the foot of the rock, which was of course locked. But the key was hanging on the side of the box and Nilpferd couldn't resist to have a look inside.

In addition to a power supply unit and a overvoltage protector, the metal box contained a device from the American company Pacific Crest called "ADL Vantage" (what's that?).
The research showed that this system is used for an RTK (Real Time Kinematic) function.
A GPS receiver is located at a precisely measured position, which distributes the difference between the currently measured position and the correct position by radio.
The information is then sent to the snow groomers during slope preparation, which can determine their position with centimeter accuracy using their own GPS measurement and the correction data received by radio.
Therefore they can drive very precisely and this prevents them from accidentally hitting a cable car pole or rolling over a toilet cabin at the side of the ski slope at night or during a snowstorm 😁.
There was a sticker on the outside of the metal box saying "SNOWsat Repeater Station".
This indicates that the GPS receiver is at a different location and here only its correction signals are forwarded so that they can be received everywhere in the ski area.
Oh, that was a lot of technology today, but after we had climbed „Mt. Antenna“ we climbed another real mountain.

With a height of 1135m above sea level Mt. Maiwand is really not particularly high, but the ascent is quite challenging.
For this reason, here even after about 6 weeks the STF was still possible.
And the descent into the valley was also abnormally.
It was not dangerous, but a huge mess. Heavy vehicles had driven here after forestry work and left a trail of devastation.
After the rain of the past few days, the path was very, very muddy.

We already have climbed Mt. Laber near Oberammergau several times, but since last year there is a new cache up there. Unfortunately, it's a multi cache, but Nilpferd preferred to take a different (steeper) route to the summit, which doesn't pass any of the 10 stages.
But with knowledge of the area and a little mathematics, the coordinates could be determined at home and the checker was green immediately.
There wasn't much snow on the ascent and we were optimistic that we could find the cache. However, when we reached the destination, we stood in front of a large snowfield. At least half a meter of snow and no indication where the cache might be.
As the owner is not known for precise coordinates, we didn't even try to dig out the cache and took our lunch break on the bench nearby.
After all, there was another cache on the descent, and so we finally found a cache today.

After we got stuck in the snow a few days ago and didn't reach our destination, today we only went to the absolutely snow-free flatlands near Lake Ammersee.
There is a canyon where the path was partly destroyed by a flood in 2021 and the municipal administration apparently has no interest (or no money) to rebuild the path, but there are still 2 old caches (one of them was hidden in 2002) in the canyon.
So today we walked over slippery paths, fallen trees and broken bridges to a 16m high waterfall at the end of the canyon.
And there was also a lost place, a former water mill, to explore along the way.
An interesting hike even without any significant elevation gain.