Up to Hofpürglhütte
Back to Austria – day 1, when we were taken to Filzmoos and then a bit further to Almsee. That one is a very small lake, much smaller than we expected, but there is an intersting building on the way to it. It is the Chapel of Maria am Steineggl and surprisingly it’s quite new, having been consecrated in 2016.
Above the door, the words are: “In der lebendigen Natur geschieht nichts das nicht in Verbindung mit dem Ganzen steht” which could be translated to English as “Nothing happens in living nature that is not connected with the whole“.
Thought-provoking, isn’t it? I was prepared to be looking for it in some religious texts but actually I found out it is a quote by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
And I was surprised even more to find that the quote comes from Goethe’s thoughts on experiments in his Natural science writings from the end of 18th century. Here is the quote in the context of the writings, which sounds quite thoughtful, see for yourself:
“Nothing happens in living nature that is not connected with the whole, and if experiences appear to us only as isolated, if we have to regard experiments only as isolated facts, this does not mean that they are isolated; the only question is: how do we find the connection between the phenomena of the event?“
But back to the track. We were supposed to return to Filzmoos on foot but because the path round the Almsee was quite short and not that much interesting we decided to choose a longer path leading first to the hut Hofpürglhütte.
It was a sunny day and the path up was quite steep so that meant a challenging start but the views were rewarding.
What I really liked was the consistent marking of the path, you could follow it easily, which in my experience cannot be taken for granted.
We could see this red-and-white marking everywhere along the tracks we were following in the Schladming area and they never disappointed us, thumbs up.
Here is the Hofpürglhütte itself, with its lovely shutters and view of the valley…
…and here are some views from the way up to the hut and down back to Filzmoos. Can you also see a whale or a large fish in the shape of the stone below? Looked funny…
There were not many people on this track, actually just a few and that was refreshing. Popular destinations tend to be crowded and noisy nowadays and this touch of nature felt invigorating…
