Friederspitz and Frieder

Having not been in the mountains for a while, combined with a week with a mixture of fresh snow and rain in the mountains, before it suddenly warmed up for the weekend, it was hard to know how high we could go without the snow being very hard work. We took a chance and headed to Frieder as we knew the view from the top with the clear air that we were expecting would be brilliant.

On the drive towards the mountains in the morning it was quite clear that the air was indeed very clear, and a good sign of the views we were going to have. From the car park we gained 400m easily up a forrest track, and then another 500m easily up a winding path to just below the Frieder-Alm. Here we met the snow, and our progress slowed down significantly. Thankfully another team had gone up in front of us, so we mostly had food prints to follow, however this did not make progress easy.

The difficult progress was more than made up for by the stunning views in every direction. We could see well into Austria, possibly as far as the Italian border, a large amount of the Bavarian alps, and a clear view back towards Munich over Starnberger See. When we arrived at the summit we were not that motivated to make the descent towards Frieder, just for the extra 4m, however we made the effort, and again it was certainly worthwhile as the views of Friederspitz in front of the Zugspitze were pretty good.

After some lunch on the summit we made our way back towards Frieder, and then started the descent. This was not as easy as expected, as with the warm temperatures the snow was getting ever softer. We all ended up thigh deep in snow, multiple times. Once we were below the snow line progress soon speed up, and we were back at the car in a fairly respectable time, especially given how hard the going was above 1600m.