Zugspitze

Since the weather was scheduled to be beautiful and clear, on Sunday we headed to Zugspitze, Germany's tallest mountain. It's on the Austrian border and is 2,962 m (9,718 ft). With only about 10% cloud cover, we could see 250 km away and had fantastic views. There were lots of skiers and snowboarders, though the snow didn't look that great.

We took a cog wheel train up to the skiing area of Zugspitze and then took a cable car from there to get to the very top of the mountain where there is a viewing platform. We had thought that the cogwheel train would have scenic views the whole way up, so we were a little disappointed when it went through a tunnel that lasted much of the mountain. The views on top of Zugspitze made up for it though in my opinion. On the way down from the peak we took a different cable car that took us nearly to the base of the mountain. It felt like the cable car was angled at 60 degrees, and that made for quite a ride with views to match.

We loved the mountain scenery and thought this was one of the prettiest parts of Germany. The main downside of being at Germany's tallest point was the windchill - I wished I had remembered to bring my gloves. The first three pictures were taken from the area where skiers begin their descent (where the cogwheel train ended).




The rest of the pictures are from the viewing platform on top of Zugspitze. This was about a 10 minute cable car ride upwards from where the cogwheel train ended.

It was a struggle to get a picture of both of us. First Nate asked some guy with a very fancy camera to take a picture of us, thinking he would know what he was doing (since we have a camera that a lot of people don't understand how to use). Those pictures came out so awful it's comical. Later we asked someone else to take a picture of us, and through some cropping of the photo, we ended up with one picture that turned out ok:



The gold marker in the back of the next picture marks the actual peak of Zugspitze.