Hohe Kisten, Bavaria, Germany

This hike has been completed on 8th July 2018 according to Outdooractive description. This hike has been done with the Hiking Munich Facebook group.

The lockdown in Germany is giving me free time, therefore I can finally write the reports of the hikes I did in the past year. This time I chose the Hohe Kisten (Big Box) peak in Bavaria, which was a hike trip I organised in collaboration with the Hiking Munich facebook group.

The starting point for this hike is the Eschenlohe train station, which is reachable from Munich in about 1h journey. From the station, we had to follow the Bahnofstrasse, crossing the bridge over the Loisach river and follow the Krottenkopfstraße, till reaching the actual trailhead. 

There are two possible ways to follow here, the easiest unattractive forest road or the more difficult (but higher rewarding) Hahnbichlsteig throughout the forest. We opted naturally for the latter.

The Hahnbichlsteig is a quite steeply climb that will surely break your breath, being at the very start of this quite long hike. Eventually the path will get flatter and widens again reconnecting to the forest way. From here we followed the signed for the Pustertal Hütte.

After few more kilometres we reached the beautiful meadow at the Pustertal Hut, which is ideal for a break. We decided to continue though, and to stop on the way back instead. From the meadow, the trail starts to climb again, giving amazing view of the hut and the surrounding mountains.

This part is probably the hardest and nicest part of this hike. The trail goes first into a forest, which makes place to a rocky path that follows the side of the mountain. The path continues to go up, until you spot the cross over the Hohe Kisten peak on your left.

To reach the peak, we had basically to cross and go to the other side of the mountain. Then we followed the ridge for about a kilometer, until we spot the sign for the Hohe Kisten peak on our left. From here, there are just few more steps to get to the top, where we stopped for our deserved lunch break.

After the break, we followed back our steps till the Pusteral hut meadow, where we were welcomed by some (too) friendly horses, which were probably more interested in the contents of our backpacks than in ourselves. From the meadow we continued the descent, this time following the easier forest road that brought us back to the trailhead and again to the train station.

I hope you liked this report and to be able to write more often, waiting for better times to go back to the mountains. Stay home and see you next time!