‘People smuggled everything over this pass,’ says Andreas Neurauter, stopping on a switchback above the Schlegeis reservoir, its water the colour of a glacier. ‘Salt, tobacco, coffee, in both directions, depending on which side had the shortage that year.’ Andreas is a nature guide by trade and an astronomy guide by passion, pointing out alpine choughs overhead and Bronze Age crystal workings underfoot in the same breath.
The path climbs gently at first, switchbacking above the reservoir through close-cropped alpine grass, then flattens into a long traverse where marmots whistle from the rockpiles and the Zillertal Alps unfold in every direction, ridge behind ridge. By the time the scree starts underfoot and the last trees give up, Pfitscherjoch is already in view, a wide green saddle that looks, from a distance, like nothing more than a fold in a blanket.
‘People have crossed here for nine thousand years, maybe longer,’ Andreas says, crouching to point out a scatter of pale stone at the trailside. ‘This is rock crystal. Bronze Age traders worked it right here on the pass; you can still find the waste flakes if you know where to look.’ He straightens up and keeps walking, keeps talking. ‘Later it was salt, and later still coffee. During the war there was a mine here too, forced labour, terrible conditions, right into this mountain. And after the war, smuggling never really stopped. My grandfather’s generation still remembers it. You did not ask too many questions about what was in somebody’s rucksack up here.’ Some of that history is laid out properly, with maps and artefacts, in the small exhibition Grenzenlos at the Lavitzalm, a hut we pass with just enough time to look and not quite enough to linger.
The pass has other traffic too, most of it airborne. ‘Every autumn we net birds here, tens of thousands of them crossing in a single season,’ Andreas says, pointing to where researchers from BirdLife Tirol and the Hochgebirgs-Naturpark Zillertaler Alpen string their mist nets near the col. ‘Chaffinches, swallows, siskins. A soft landing, then straight back into the sky.’
Pfitscherjochhaus sits right on the border, and because the hut technically stands on the Italian side, lunch is mandatory. I order tagliatelle ai funghi porcini, the pasta glossy with butter and full of mushrooms picked from these same slopes, and wash it down with a radler, cold and only faintly sweet, in the sun on the terrace with Italy on one side of the table and Austria on the other. Andreas raises his glass before we start the walk back down. ‘To the smugglers,’ he says.
I arrive at Stoankasern on an e-bike, climbing thirteen hundred vertical metres. The Zillertal takes its biking seriously: the valley counts more than 1,300 kilometres of signed routes, from gentle valley paths along the river to alpine trails that would flatten a normal bike well before the treeline. Charging points sit outside most mountain huts now, and half the bikers are electric, people twice my age and clearly enjoying it.
The Swiss cook at the Jausenstation is standing in front of the hut with binoculars when I roll in, tracking a line of hikers strung along the ridge below the Grüblspitze, doing the maths that will decide how many plates go out at lunch. He lowers the binoculars just long enough to nod at my bike.
Inside the dairy next door, Tobias Huber, Tobi to everyone here, is turning curds in a copper kettle the size of a hot tub. ‘You heat the milk slowly, then add the rennet, and you have to feel when the curd is ready, not watch a clock,’ he says, squeezing the curd between his fingers. ‘Then it is cut, stirred, pressed into the moulds, and it goes into the cellar for the next few months.’ He is twenty and came up to the alm, he tells me, because he wanted an outdoor life rather than an indoor industrial one. Between April and October he processes 1,400 litres of milk a day from 120 cows into six wheels of Bergkäse, each one 25 to 30 kilos, plus Tilsiter and red mould cheese besides. ‘Two in the morning until eleven, every day,’ he says, and shrugs like it is a fair trade. ‘You get used to the hours. You do not get used to how good it tastes when it is finally ready.’ One of the Bergkäse wheels recently won gold at the Käsiade, the Alpine cheese championship.
Hanna Lederer brings the plates out, laughing at something one of the other guests has said, the kind of laugh that turns heads at neighbouring tables and makes the whole terrace feel more cheerful than it was thirty seconds earlier. She is twenty-three, in her second summer on the alm, and grew up on a farm in Bavaria, so the alpine lifestyle does not faze her. ‘The mountains require you to be flexible,’ she says, still smiling, setting down a board of bread and cheese, ‘and to accept whatever nature decides.’ Bergkäse ripens for many months at this altitude before it is ready, slowly enough that it barely develops the holes that come easily in the valley below.
Nature guide Andreas Neurauter leads astronomy tours onto the ridges above the Zillertal, tracking meteor showers, eclipses and clear-night skies far from any city glow. Bring a camera, or just your eyes, and let him do the explaining.
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Via ferrata ladders and crawl spaces lead deep into the Spannagel cave, guided by geologists who can read the marble like a book. A cool, dramatic detour from the summer heat, open year-round above Hintertux.
We know where to go. We know the best places to stay. And we know the local partners who turn a trip into something unforgettable. That’s why when we design your journey, it isn’t just a holiday. It’s a story you’ll carry for life.
Our mission is simple: to inspire you to explore the world with curiosity, optimism, enthusiasm, and respect. To connect with cultures, to marvel at breathtaking landscapes, and to embrace the beauty of untamed nature.
So, tell us — what once-in-a-lifetime adventure may we design for you?
The Spannagel cave was found by accident in 1919, when Alois Hotter, who ran the hut above it, noticed a draught coming from a crack that had no business breathing. It took until the 1960s for anyone to explore it properly, and until 1994, thanks to hut keeper Josef Klausner, for a section to open to visitors. We start as a full group, eight of us plus Christoph Anfang, who manages the cave today, and Jan Koutny, who guides here while finishing a geology degree. Christoph leads us through the entrance chambers, telling the cave’s history.
Halfway in, at the top of the first via ferrata section, the group splits. Christoph turns back with half of us towards the easier route, and I carry on with Jan, deeper, into the ladders and crawl spaces where the ceiling gets ever lower.
‘You are climbing through roughly two hundred and eighty million years of pressure right now,’ Jan says, running his headlamp beam over a wall streaked like a cut of bacon. ‘This whole system is marble, one of the biggest in the Alps, running from Hintertux south to the Spannagelhaus.’ He raps a knuckle against the rock. ‘It used to be seabed. Then the African plate pushed into the European one and folded all of this upward, squeezed it, cooked it, and what was mud and shell became this.’ He points out a seam of pure white running through the grey. ‘That line is a different pressure, a different depth, from the layer next to it. You are basically climbing through a very slow collision.’ Further in he says: ‘Summer, winter, does not matter. It has been two degrees in here since before either of us existed, and it will be two degrees long after we are gone.’
We climb ladders, duck, and crawl our way back out eventually, and by the time we do, the fine grey silt of the cave has got into everything. It is in my coverall, under my fingernails, worked into every dial and seam of my camera, a fine dust that no amount of brushing on the walk back to the hut seems to shift.
Late in the afternoon we climb up, Andreas leading again, toward a plateau just below the Rastkogel. A small group of us follow him up while the light is golden, cameras and tripods clinking against rucksacks. By the time we reach the plateau there is nothing between the sun and us except the moon, which has begun, very deliberately, to take a bite out of it.
Andreas sets up cameras and hands out special eclipse glasses to the group. He explains the mechanics of a partial eclipse to anyone who will listen, while I go looking for a foreground. I find one in Bjorn, a Dutch hiker in the group who has no idea yet that he is about to become the picture of his own trip. With a long lens and some patient repositioning, I line him up against the crescent of light dropping towards the horizon in the west. The sun is setting somewhere behind the distant shape of the Zugspitze in Germany. Bjorn jumps from rock to rock without knowing quite what for, but when I show him the results he understands that he is now part of a historic moment, captured for posterity.
As luck would have it, this particular alignment, a partial solar eclipse falling on the same August night as the peak of the Perseid meteor shower, under a new moon dark enough to see the Perseids properly, has not happened in a century. Nobody on the ridge is in a hurry to leave. We wait out the last of the colour together, then start down in the dark, headlamps bobbing in a loose line, and somewhere on the descent the first Perseids begin scratching lines across the sky above us, as if the mountain had simply swapped one show for another before we had even reached the end of the hike. I withdraw inside my own head, recalling what spectacular beauty the Zillertal has shown me. It leaves you wanting more.
From flat valley paths along the Ziller to alpine climbs ending at 2,000-metre alms, the Zillertal is built for two wheels. E-bike rental and charging points are everywhere, so the only real decision is how far uphill the motor takes you.
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