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Touring report written by Vale Rapp – Flow Valley
Fresh snow, beautiful weather and no early starts. The perfect recipe for meeting a big crowd on the mountain in the extremely popular ski touring destination of Sellrain. But usually it’s enough to look a little bit off the beaten track to be alone on the way.
The Rote Kogel is usually climbed from Sellrain. A beautiful long but rather flat ascent over the north-east side of the mountain, which is highly recommended for its scenery. The advantage is that the tour can also be done when the avalanche situation is tense, but if you are a more downhill-oriented tourer, you will not get your money’s worth.
Coming from Innsbruck, we drive through Sellrain and park at the small lake below Praxmar. Our destination is the somewhat more challenging west side of the Rote Kogel. The tour is a little steeper in the middle section and requires safe snow conditions. For the ascent, you should be able to make solid hairpin turns and correctly assess the avalanche situation.
In the village we meet the expected throng of ski tourers, but fortunately they have taken the fashionable tours on the Zischgeles or the Lampsenspitze.
If you don’t want to spend the whole day in the shade, you can start the tour on the west side a little more comfortably, as the sun only starts to peek over the mountain at around 11:00 am. At the car, however, there is still heavy fog and we hope that we will see the sun at all today. However, 1250 metres of altitude with about 15 cm of fresh snow await us, which need to be freshly groomed. So let’s get into our ski boots and get going!
From the car park, climb along the summer path to the Gallwiesalm. There we keep to the left until we reach the Aflinger Alm. After the alpine pasture, we reach a large cirque heading east and, fortunately for us, also the upper end of the fog. For the rest of the ascent we now have a fantastic sea of clouds below us and a great view of the other peaks of the Lüsenstal. We first ascend the cirque in the middle, then cross to the right ridge and work our way up in hairpin bends to a flat section. Once there, we come across a signpost and follow the summer path to the summit ridge. This is unfortunately quite blown off. We reach the summit on this day only on foot. But this in no way diminishes the joy of the fantastic view of the freshly sugared mountains and the sea of fog in the valley.
Those who still want to exhaust their energy reserves have the option of skiing down the north-eastern slopes of the summit and then climbing back up towards the Sömen summit. However, we don’t do this on this day, as it is very windy on the east side.
The descent basically follows the ascent route, but especially in the upper part there is plenty of space to draw your own track in the snow. We literally fly down into the valley over the fresh new snow. Here and there we have to be careful because the base is missing, but this is out of all proportion to the fact that we are on the way in the Sellrain in brilliant weather and fresh powder.
Tour data:
Starting point: Car park at the small lake below Praxmar (1580m).
Destination: Roter Kogel (2832m)
Altitude difference: 1250 hm
Weather: fog at the bottom, beautiful sunshine at the top
Snow conditions: Powder with little base in places