Gesäuse
Styria's whitewater-and-walls park — the young Enns roaring through a limestone gorge under the Hochtor, with the world's largest monastery library at the gate.
Gesäuse, declared in 2002, is the youngest of Austria's six national parks and the loudest: the name comes from Gseis — the roaring — for the sixteen kilometres in which the Enns saws through the Ennstal Alps between Admont and Hieflau, falling some 150 metres in a bed of rapids. Straight out of the water rise the north walls of the Hochtor group — Hochtor itself at 2,369 metres, Planspitze, Ödstein — with the Buchstein massif answering across the river: limestone faces standing up to eighteen hundred metres over the gorge, in a park of roughly 110 square kilometres where almost nothing is level.
These walls are a cradle of Austrian climbing — the "university of mountaineering", where the bold routes of the early 1900s were invented and paid for; the climbers' cemetery at Johnsbach, kept since 1906, holds more than a hundred of the mountains' dead. The valley floor plays gentler games: the Enns and the Johnsbach are classic whitewater, the gravel banks still host the German tamarisk that regulated rivers have lost, chamois watch from the ledges, and golden eagles work the updraughts off the Planspitze.
At the western gate stands Admont, a Benedictine abbey founded in 1074, whose baroque library hall — the largest monastery library room in the world, seventy thousand volumes under seven frescoed cupolas — makes the strangest possible antechamber to a wilderness of rockfall and rapids. Johnsbach, the one farmed valley inside the mountains, is a certified mountaineering village; Gstatterboden, mid-gorge, is barely a hamlet.
What's worth knowing before you go
Admont is the base, reached by rail and bus via Liezen and Selzthal, with a seasonal Gesäuse bus serving the gorge road. The rafting season runs on snowmelt from May; the big secured scrambles onto the Hochtor plateau are July-to-September undertakings, with snow lying in the north-face gullies into early summer and the huts booked hard in August. Autumn, when the larches turn against grey limestone, is the photographers' window.
The connoisseur's hour is first light at the Haindlkar hut — the shortest walk in the Alps to a wall that size — or, gentler, the Weidendom near Gstatterboden: a living cathedral of woven willows by the Enns, the park's odd green chapel.