Day 4 – Into The Innerfeldtal

Feb 8, 2023

Today’s Adventure

For today’s adventure Cindy and I took a long hike in the Innerfeldtal valley. We first visited this dramatic steep-walled canyon during our winter 2020 visit to this area. It was just a short ride on a Südtirolmobil bus from Innichen to the base of the valley where we started our hike.

The Innerfeldtal is a popular nature park all year round, but it takes on a special magic once the snow starts to fall. There’s a road that brings you to a parking area not too far from the most photogenic part of the valley, but we did things the hard way (of course) and walked the entire length in both directions.

One of the landmarks in the valley is the 10,000 foot Dreischusterspitze, namesake for the hütte where we enjoyed a much-needed hot lunch after the first half of our walk. The Dreischusterhütte is a classic chalet-style hütte that greeted us with a roaring fire in the woodstove – something that helped to take the chill off from the single digit temperatures.

There weren’t many folks there when we arrived as the kitchen didn’t start service until 11:30, but shortly afterwards all three of the dining rooms were full with the arrival of a large group. Our timing was impeccable as we had seen no one on the hike until our trail merged with the access road from the parking area, but even then we only saw a few folks. The same was true for the return portion of the hike, so we were very happy with that turn of events as we really really really don’t like to see other traffic on our trail.

For lunch Cindy had a traditional Tyrolean-style barley soup with a basket of assorted bread. Stuart had his usual hiker’s lunch of fried eggs, speck, and potatoes, in this case served in a sizzling hot skillet. While many of the rifugios that we’ve visited in this area have a greeter dog, usually a Bernese Mountain Dog or Golden Retriever, the Dreischusterhütte has a beautiful (and quite well fed) greeter cat. This extremely chill black feline was sitting in one of the windows supervising the dining room when we arrived, but I soon figured out that it was actually sitting on a built-in radiator. Smart cat. It patiently put up with attention from lots of people (including small children) before it finally went outside to sit in the sunshine.

After lunch we walked out into the meadow for some photos and then headed back down the trail. As we approached our original starting point at the entrance to the valley we noticed a connecting trail that would take us all the way back to Innichen (instead of having to catch a bus) so we decided to take the long way home. As a bonus this alternative took us past the Wildbad Innichen (see Day 3) from a different direction and gave us a unique view of those ruins from a narrow ridge line high above.

The weather was sunny and crystal clear but the temperatures were in the single digits for the start of our hike. It remained very cold all day long with afternoon highs in town were only in the low 20’s, so no doubt it was colder than that in the higher elevations of the Innerfeldtal. In fact by the time we reached the Dreischusterhütte for lunch Stuart’s beard was completely frosted over and the water lines for our Camelbaks were frozen solid!

All told we hiked 11.5 miles with about 2,000 feet of elevation gain. Our time on the trail was just under five hours, so we managed a respectable 25 minutes per mile in spite of the snowy conditions that required us to wear our ice cleats for the return trip. It wasn’t our first visit to the Innerfeldtal and it certainly won’t be our last …

For Innichen’s main page click here.

For Castelrotto’s main page click here.

For the entire trip’s main page click here.