Snow, Tears, and a Double Rainbow: Hiking the Plassen Above Hallstatt, Austria

The first thing Hallstatt does is go quiet on you. You come down to the lake early, before the day-trippers, and the water is dead flat and grey-green, the mountains are wearing their clouds low like they’re not quite awake yet, and a single swan slides past as if it’s been hired to set the mood. It’s the kind of silence that makes you whisper without deciding to.

And somewhere above all that postcard calm, there’s a trail. Which brings me to the embarrassing part.

I’m scared of heights. Not “ooh, a little dizzy on a balcony” scared — more like “my legs stop being legs and turn into two unreliable noodles” scared. So picking Hallstatt, a village physically wedged between a vertical wall of rock and a very deep lake, as the place to go up a mountain was, in hindsight, an interesting decision.

And here’s the contradiction I’ve never managed to resolve: I’m scared of heights and I’m hopelessly pulled toward mountains. Both, at full volume, all the time. The same drop that liquefies my legs is the exact thing I keep buying plane tickets to get closer to. I don’t entirely understand it. I just know that when I see a ridge line, the fear and the wanting show up together, holding hands.

So we went up.

A town built on salt