These stupendous hills

One of my goals for our trip to Austria was to get to the top of a mountain and have a beer. Today I achieved that goal.

(I’m not sure if you can use an image as a link very easily in Jekyll - but try to click to get the full panorama)

The Schafberg isn’t the tallest mountain near Salzburg - at 1783m it’s only a little more than half the height of Dachstein at 2995m.

But what the Schafberg has is a cog railway that can take you top the top! The climb is too steep for a traditional train, so the train is driven using a cog that bites into a serrated third rail. I failed to get photos of the actual cog mechanism, much to my great chagrin.

Another disappointment is that, despite the name (Schafberg literally means sheep mountain), I didn’t see any sheep.