The return of the sheep

After a few days of full-day occupancy of sliding lectures, icy exercises and inverse, densifying or very hot projects, we finally could look out to the Sunday. The idea was to organize the traditional excursion, including the meeting with the Ötzi guy in his natural environment and a delicious mountain meal in the Bella Vista hut. During the following days, however, nature revealed us one of its most well known characteristics: its chaotic behaviour. The weekend announced itself as a full two-day washout, including low temperatures and snow in the high mountains. To make it even worse, Georg, our brave excursion leader, truly did not enjoy this forecast, and would get more ill as the weekend approached. The only positive news came from the hotel owner Paul, who declared that; "The weather is always better than it is forecasted". The final decision would be postponed to the Sunday morning during breakfast.

Apparently Paul seems to be a true positivist, because when we all came together for breakfast, the rain already started and did not seem to finish real soon. Georg finally announced that the excursion was postponed to Wednesday, which we all could agree with. As an alternative, he proposed us a broad range of different activities, from staying home (read: going back to bed), walking in the bad weather to the visit to a castle nearby, followed by a visit to the yearly traditional sheep return from the mountains. Although we had a very long bar night before, we practically all (apart from a certain British citizen, who just had only 20% of his sleep on that very moment) agreed with the castle and sheep combination. Georg ordered a few bus taxis and we soon left for the castle, located near the entrance of the Schnals valley. On the way, all of us realized that the night before really was too long, driving on the curvy mountain roads, but fortunately we reached the castle safely. Surrounded by nothing but cloudy, foggy and saturated air, the castle created a mystical atmosphere on its own. During about one hour, we got a tour around the castle, owned by the famous climber Reinhold Messner. He keeps a lot of the local treasures and symbols from his climbing expeditions all around the world in his castle, which is nice.

The group gathers by the castle	1400 sheep coming into the valley

After the castle tour the taxi drove us to the upper end of the valley to the ski station Kurzras, where this very day the sheep would return from the mountains after a nice summer (holiday) with fresh mountain grass and clean air. After a lunch in the local restaurant we walked up to the place and after a while we revealed the first white animals coming into the valley. The weather still was horrible, with lots of rain and only some degrees above freezing, so the sheep must have had an exhausting walk. They had indeed, because some of them instantly fell down, too exhausted to stay up. But in general, the young Karthaus scientists had a lot of sympathy for these animals, so the sheep had a lot of international attention for an hour or two. Apart from the sheep, also other meat was taken care of: a lot of us integrated into the local community and tried the local sausage, accompanied by some Alpine Lederhosen music. The local beer, however, was rarely ordered (hmm, what could have been the reason for that?). As you can imagine, we had a really nice time up there, before we all returned to our warm, dry and very nice Goldenen Rose hotel.