Since Gina's hurt pads had been healing up nicely it was time to take her for another hike. Since the temps were going to be in low 70's I thought it would be good idea to take her for a hike to Ötschergräben. For some reason I wasn't able to book Gina's ticket online and had to do it at the railway station. Turns out that Mariazellerbahn is considered a private train and therefore I have to purchase Gina's ticket on the train. But that meant we were unable to catch the earlier train. So we had ti take the next train 1 hour later. But this was no biggy. Took us about 1 1/4 hours to reach Erlaufklause for where we were going to start the hike. But I really didn't remember how slow this train was traveling. But you get a good impression of the countryside. We had to head down from the train station before we could walk across the dam of Erlaufstausee. Gina and water is a different story. She really is drawn to water and it's sometimes not that easy to make it clear that she can't go swimming any time she feels like. We started our hike via Hagengut on the forest road. I had decided that I was going to take the forest road all the way to Vorderötscher. That way I could check on how good Gina was doing with her paws. But she was being perfectly fine. My knee that had been bothering me a couple of weeks ago was giving me no problems at all. About 2 hours later we made it to the trail to Vorderötscher. But shortly after the decent my knee started to bother me. I did think of taking the same route back.
But on the other hand the decent into Ötschergräben was only short and the canyon hike itself was pretty much a hike on flat ground. We did take a break of about 1/2 hour to rehydrate and I had a soup as well. We then continued the decent into the canyon. And of course Gina had to walk twice into a creek nearby. This dog just loves water and there's apparently nothing better than drinking out of a creek. The rest of the decent was pretty much uneventful. But of course it was not exactly fun, at least as far as my knee was concerned. The hike through Ötschergräben was fun as it is always. Meeting way too many people on a narrow path not so much. And a lot of them just didn't know the proper hiking etiquette. And Ötschergräben being part of this years "state exhibit" wasn't exactly helpful either. The thing I noticed, that they had been doing a lot of work. The path is much more convenient now that it used to be. There are much more iron cables to hold on, but this definitely takes away lots of the wildness of the canyon. So as far as I'm concerned it's not a improvement and I don't really like it. We made our along the narrow path trough the canyon and although my knee was bothering I still did enjoy it. And Gina definitely had lots of fun and she was
doing very well. Always interested in her surroundings but doing very well with the narrow path. And it was always fun watching her to have mentally figure out were the path is going. We did take a break in the shade in the canyon and just enjoying nature. Gina also got another chance to cool off in Ötscherbach and she did have way too much fun.
We then made our way to Ötscherhias. But I decided not to take a break there. Since we did have a train to catch. We climbed slowly out of the canyon and my knee was even bothering when hiking uphill. But we did make it out of the canyon and made our way past Hagengut back to the train station. And we did make it to the train station with 10 minutes to spare. Otherwise we would have had to wait for another hour for the next train. By 7.30 pm we were back home.
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