Mature Flâneur
Innsbruck, Up and Down
Two ways of looking at Austria’s most charming city
We drove into Innsbruck late Friday afternoon the last weekend of April. The day was cloudy, with drizzling rain forecast for much of the coming week. Every now and then, the sky would clear enough that something solid would appear in the sky. Solid, white-mottled grey, and very large. The Austrian Alps were all around us, but we could barely see them. If these hills were alive with the sound of music, we could not hear it.
The next morning, my weather app said there would be partial sun at mid-morning, so Teresa and I raced through an early breakfast and headed out to the nearby funicular ride up the hillside to Hungerburg. The name sounds like a fast food chain, but it’s actually a little hamlet with a gondola ride, the Nordekette. The cable car takes you right to the top of Mount Hafelekar, overlooking Innsbruck from the north. On the way up, we actually caught our first good view of the Alps across the valley from Innsbruck (photo above).
Seeing big mountains like this is always exhilarating for both Teresa and me. They just open up something, a sense of awe, of wonder that the world contains such grandeur. To be flying up the side of one of these alps so fast — our morning coffee still warm in our bellies — in a gondola, took our breath away, literally. We rose so high, so fast, that the altitude and thin air hit us at the top as if we were winded.
Winded, and wintered, too! While it was springtime and sixty at the base, the temperature was not much above freezing at the summit. Snow covered the upper reaches of the mountain. The top layer was fresh. The drizzle we experienced yesterday in Innsbruck laid down a bright white blanket up top that was almost blinding. We sucked in cold air, and the north wind raced over the snow like a blast from a walk-in freezer.
We scampered out of the gondola like a couple of school kids after the first snow of the year, racing up the slippery trail round the back of the facility to the high point of the alpine ridge. From there, we looked north, and glimpsed the vast white, grey and green frozen wilderness of the Karwendel Nature Park that runs to the German border.
In summertime, this viewpoint is the start of a gentle, easy hike along the ridge, suitable for beginners even though the altitude is high and the view panoramic. But in late April, it’s all one slippery, white slope. Our fellow gondola passengers took their Instagram-moment photos. The kids threw a few snowballs. Okay, I threw one too. But not at Teresa, I swear. Then, there was nowhere to go but back to the gondola.
As we turned towards Nordekette, we started paying attention to Innsbruck and the Inn Valley far below us. I’ve looked at the city on a map countless times in anticipation of this trip, but I never really got the geography of North Tyrol before. This part of Austria is basically one huge glacial valley that runs west-to-east with mountains on both sides, north (Germany) and south (Italy). The Inn River that runs through Innsbruck stretches from the source high in the Swiss Alps at St. Moritz Lake, to where it joins the Danube near the Czech border, 517 kilometers in all (about 300 miles).
To cross North Tyrol by car from the Scharnitz Pass in Germany to the Brenner Pass in Italy takes an hour; the winding road is only 42 miles (as the Austrian red eagle flies, barely 35 miles). We will be getting to know this stretch of mountains well over the next few weeks.
We were back strolling the streets of Innsbruck’s old town before noon. The sun had come out, and it seemed the entire city was outdoors. Today was Saturday, the start of a long holiday weekend. You could easily tell the locals from the tourists because the former were mostly wearing T-shirts, while the latter were wearing sweaters and coats.
There’s much I could (and will) write about this gorgeous, historic gem of a city, with its Gothic and Rococo architecture and many-colored and decorated walls that make the old town look like a frosted cake. Indeed, Innsbruck’s nickname is “the Jewel of the Austrian Alps.” But this first sunny afternoon, what captured my attention was that everywhere I looked, I could see the peaks peeking over the tops of the buildings. It was one of the most extraordinary things, to have seen the city first from the mountaintops, and now from the bottom of the valley, looking back up. Please notice in the photos below that the mountains in the background are all different!
Sitting at a riverside cafe after our stroll, sipping wine and spritzers, Teresa and I looked across the banks of the Inn and up at Mount Kafelkar. We realized we could see the two top gondola stations of Nordkette (below right). That’s exactly where we were standing just a few hours earlier. We’ve looked at Innsbruck from both sides now, from up and down, and still somehow…why is a Joni Mitchell song running through my head? Okay, maybe we really don’t know Innsbruck at all — yet. But day one done, we are sure loving it.
