One Marvelous Adventure
- 3 minsSaturday, 3rd of August.
It started on a sunny Saturday, spending the weekend with a friend in Friedrichshafen. An idea jumped: “why don’t we go to Bregenz in Austria to hike for 3 or 4 hours in the afternoon?” while enjoying the sunny and cool weather.
Ascent
We took the car, drove for 30-40 mins crossing the borders to Bregenz, parking near the cable car station of Pfänderbahn. Then we rode the cable car up to Pfänder Station uphill. 
The adventure starts now!
Around 15:00
We discussed our route with the expert hiker friend, asked for a 3-4 hours round-trip so that we could be down before dawn. He proposed a peak called Hirschberg which is less than 2 hrs from our place, around 5-7 km (as per our estimate), so we started our journey. Remember, it is not later than 15:30 right now!
We started walking, very excited, feeling fresh. The weather is more than awesome and everything looks pretty great!
The route seemed to be around 13 km, but unfortunately we didn’t know that before we started!
We passed by really awesome places, farms that sell dairy products especially the famous cheese Bergkäse (mountain cheese) so we planned to buy some homemade cheese on our way down (should be less than two hours from now).
Finally, we reached our destination: Hirschberg.
Have a look:
We relaxed for a while, ate some energy bars and drank hell lot of water, then started the return trip. We have around 2 hrs till dawn, we can do it, or we think so!
Descent
On our way down we followed the marks of the relatively easier tracks to make it down in the 2 hrs we have. On the first crossroads we chose the one path, which happened to be the wrong one. This is the first 0.5 hr loss!
We continued our way down, but the sun was much faster than us. We reached our start point 0.5 hour before sunset but we had a little problem, the cable car station was already closed, so we have to take the last 400m elevation walking down to Bregenz where we parked our car.
We met some local hikers whom we asked about the road to know which one is the easiest and fastest, as one of our friends had pain in one of his knees and it was really hard for him to continue descending.
We passed by the other hikers then we stopped and could not decide which path to take anymore. It is already 21:00 and the sun set! We have to finish ASAP so as not to spend the night in the forest, though it might have been cool 
!
We waited till the other hikers arrived to our crossroads and asked them about the way down. We walked together till we reached the foothill. They were really cool Austrians!
They left us in the middle of the way down as they lived in one of the mountain houses, so we had another nearly half hour till the foothill.
Finally we arrived at the parking at 22:30, with 27 km of hiking, starting elevation was 400m then reaching 1200m, nearly one and half hour after sunset with sore muscles, delay of around 3 hours and with hell lot of stress!
But was really fun and exciting trip!
Omar Kamel
Not only an engineer