Week 27: Loser Panoramastraße
This weekend we drove an hour to the Loser Mountain. The mountain is the most prominent landmark of the Ausseerland, a small region of the Salzkammergut in between Styria and Upper Austria. We have actually been in this area before. If you remember week 9 we walked the lower village around Altaussee. This time, we wanted to go explore the top of the iconic Loser Plateau.
Loser Plateau is shown at the top of this image.
You can reach the top of the mountain by car using the toll road for 9 km or about 15 minutes.The toll rate for a car during the day was €18. You can check the rates of other vehicles and times here.
If you are a driving fan, the Loser Panoramastrasse is a perfect road to enjoy the scenery and at the same time test your mountain driving skills. The Loser Panoramastrasse is open between April and October/November depending on the weather. At the beginning of our accent, most of the snow was melted, but with every switchback snow began to rise. By the time we reached the end of the road at the top, the snow was piled up as high as our car.
I was a bit disappointed as I had intended arriving to see something like this and hiking up to the very top of the plateau.
Instead, we arrived to see this. We will come back later this summer to do all of the hiking trails!
We enjoyed the breathtaking view anyway and ended up finding the best lunch spot. It was on a platform where paragliders take their big running jump. We were able to see a few paragliders during the hour we were here. Behind us you can see several solar panels. This is actually part of the largest solar power plant in the Alps. The Loser plant was built from 1988 to 1989 and consists of 598 solar modules.
After lunch, we drove 30 minutes to Topitzsee, a lake known as a Nazi naval testing station from 1943 to 1944.
Articles state the Nazi’s used this lake to experiment with different explosives and launching torpedoes into the mountains leaving massive holes in the canyon walls. Over £100 million of counterfeit money was dumped in the lake after “Operation Bernhard”. Operation Bernhard was the name of a secret German plan devised during World War II to destabilize the British economy by flooding the country with forged money, but it was never fully put into action. There is speculation there might be other valuables to be recovered from the bottom of the Toplitzsee…
Lake Toplitz is mentioned in a scene of the James Bond movie Goldfinger as well as other novels and shows. The area is only accessible on foot, via a private mile-long gravel road that serves a restaurant at the end. Along this road is a cow farm. The dogs got to see their first cows and they were very intrigued as the cow walked from the field into the barn.
