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Ötscherland, Austria

Why, a real mountain you might ask? Is it a function of altitude or difficulty to summit ? Well it’s certainly related, but the Ötscher mountain in Austria is not necessarily very high (1892m), nor is it terribly difficult to summit (good shoes and a solid footing in rough terrain is all that’s required).

What makes the Ötscher “real” is its texture – the feel of it. I caught my first glimpse of it in autumn 2006 when I was hiking in the same area.

Ötscher view 2006

That’s when I grasped its texture – the fascination of an enormous solid block of granite (photo on the left).

Chamois

It took me almost a year to go back and finally climb it. My route took me up the eastern face which is the side I saw almost a year ago. But it was not the sensation of masses of rock or the wind chill on the summit which left a lasting impression. That credit has to be given to a herd of chamois grazing at the foot of it southern rock face (photo on the right). The wind was behind them and my human presence was out of their scent.

Western face of the Ötscher

After a rough and tumble ascent over the Eastern face called ‘Rauher Kamm’ (lit. rough crest) I had a chance to the its ‘dark’ side – the western face. After all that awesome granite and talk of proper mountains of solid rock, i was slightly disappointed to discover its other side covered in green forest(photo left).

The whole area has great scenery and spectacular vistas of deep gorges, open valleys, rocky outcrops, icy streams and a generous sprinkling of local wildlife and farm animals.

See all the photos in the album Ötscher 2007 below:

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The gallery section of this website has a new design using darker colours and a mostly grey colour scheme. The older bright colour scheme didn’t do most of the photos too many favours. An image has to “work” that much harder on a white background than on a dark background. A dark background generally makes an image “pop” more, i.e. the colours seem more vibrant.
The Portfolio of underwater images was my first attempt at presenting photos on a dark background and it worked so well that I reworked my old coppermine theme to use the same technique. The new theme is called “dark_fred” and apart from more pleasing colours it has a much clearer page layout (I got rid of a lot of unneeded functionality).

Check out the new look of the gallery…

You will also find a drop down box at the bottom of the page which lets you switch back to the previous theme (called “light_fred“).

Oak Leaf

The coppermine gallery system that I use for my photos has a vanity feature that counts how many times an image was viewed in full-page mode (thumbnail views are not counted).

Today that counter passed the 10000 mark! Thanks for all your interest.

Check out the latest album of black and white images from the Vienna woods:

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