Ice course at the Franz Senn Hut in the Stubai Valley

Glacier ice and Kaiserschmarrn

Suddenly, everything is icy white. A moment of weightlessness, then a hard jolt as the harness cuts into my legs. A cloud of ice crystals trickles crackling down into the blue depths of the crevasse, then silence. I’d wanted this, after all! But there was no danger, as this fall was a planned part of an ice course run by the Böblingen/Sindelfingen district group of the German Alpine Club at the Franz Senn Hut in Upper Stubai, Tyrol.

So, while I was hanging from the rope practising self-rescue with Prusik loops, my teammates were trying their hand at building an anchor and performing a rescue with a loose pulley. What we’d learned playfully on the green grass the day before now required a lot of concentration and sweat. The crevasse rescue was one of the highlights of the course, after we’d previously covered the basic techniques of orientation, walking on snow and ice with ice axes and crampons, braking during falls, securing, and rescue. The course content was further expanded with lessons on weather, maps, glaciers, and knots.

Our base camp for the course week, the Franz Senn Hut, is more of a mountain hotel than a mountain shelter. It offers great food and service, comfortable sanitary facilities and rooms, a seminar room, and numerous practice opportunities in the nearby climbing gardens, as well as tour options on ice and rock. For these reasons, the hut is heavily frequented by courses. Thanks to a material ropeway, you can reach the Franz Senn Hut within an hour from the car park in the Oberberg Valley—effortlessly, as you’re luggage-free—in a side valley of the Stubai Valley that branches off to the east at Neustift. However, just like the accommodation, this level of comfort came at a price!

Along the way, you can spot the classic features of the Alps’ former glaciation: typical striations on the rock slabs facing down the valley, the U-shaped trough, and remains of former moraines that hint at where the ice once stood. Here, too, the dramatic retreat of the glaciers is obvious.

Alongside daily rituals like the morning weather observation, eating together, and the evening theory lesson, we were able to carry out practical exercises on interesting tours. Thanks to the good weather conditions, we could do all the exercises in the dry and mostly in the sunshine, even if the constant threat of thunderstorms often hurried us along. But in the end, we always made it back to the hut before a downpour.

While it took a lot of effort to overcome my fear and jump into the depths during the aforementioned crevasse rescue, the other projects were more inviting. A short tour to explore the surroundings and acclimatise on the first day took us to the Vordere Sommerwandspitze, which offered a magnificent view over the valley and the hut.

The next morning, we headed up the sunny northern slopes of the valley and from there, past the hidden Rinnensee lake, up to the Rinnenspitze (3,003 m). After the final section over a ridge secured as a via ferrata, the summit offers a view into the neighbouring Linsenstal, the Lüsener Glacier, and the surrounding peaks.

On the third day, we crossed the long, almost flat valley floor and then climbed up an old lateral moraine—left behind from the glacier’s position around the turn of the century—to reach the current height of the ice. We left the path leading to the Aperer Turm or into the neighbouring Oetztal to familiarise ourselves with moving on ice on the glacier. The descent from the moraine onto the glacier turned out to be more difficult than planned due to the extremely loose scree.

We thoroughly enjoyed the following, more relaxed day in the climbing gardens with Prusik exercises, abseiling, and dry runs, so we were well-prepared for the Sommerwand Glacier, where we climbed up for the crevasse rescue the next morning. We only found a suitable crevasse well above 3,000 m, even though the terrain was already quite steep.

After the hard work came the reward: on the last day, we hiked once more into the back of the valley, past the Alpein Glacier and along the path through the scree slopes to the foot of the Aperer Turm. From there, we climbed over the Verborgener Glacier and its steep flank across to the upper Lüsener Glacier. The view of the Schrankogel to the west, the Ruderhofspitze, and other peaks provided a grand farewell to the world of rock and ice in Stubai, which many people probably know better as a ski touring area.