Climbing is quite big in Austria, or at least we haven’t found a sport shop that wouldn’t sell climbing gear. But even more popular is mountain biking. Wienerwald is filled with steep trails, but the problem is that we don’t know where they are.
We have tried to find some kind of guidebook about trails, but there isn’t any. All trails in the forest are illegal so no-one can put up a guidebook. It would be like making a guidebook for banned climbing areas.
Luckily, I have found some downhill videos in Youtube. The trick is to look closely the last seconds when they ride out of the woods, and then try to locate the place. Once you find the end of the trail, you just hike up to the top to find out where the starting point is.
Anyway, as we are good citizens, we searched also for legal trails around Mödling and found Lindkogel-strecke close to Baden. It’s about 30 km long trail with a 600 meter height difference. But if you bike there from Mödling, it will become about 50 km long and 1000 meters of ascent altogether. Good training for our skinny legs.
Mödling & Anninger. Anninger doesn’t look too big compared to the mountains in the background, but it offers 5 km of downhill trails with 400m descent. I had to google a bit if that’s a lot or not. In Austria it’s not, but in Finland it would be one of the biggest. It’s twice as big as Ruka or Tahko (both 200 m), and almost the size of Ylläs (463 m), the biggest ski resort in Finland.
The shortest way to Baden goes on asphalt, but it’s downhill almost all the way and surrounded by wine fields
There was some kind of a wine festival. Now it’s the time for the first sets of “sturm”, young wine. It is also known as federweißer or federroter (depending if it's done from white or red grapes).
They closed half of the road and turned it into a 10 km long parking lot.
I have never tasted sturm before. This was made from red grapes and tasted very weird. Not bad, but definitely not what I expected. It was sparkling, sweet and quite strong, 4-10% of alcohol. Yet another Austrian drink for drinking too much.
Mandatory stop in Baden. For Swedes at least.
Back to mountainbiking. Badass downhill right in the beginning
This is where Lindkogel-strecke actually begins, a neverending uphill..
Sometimes a bit too steep to pedal
Kärlek-selfie
Anu on the trail
Finally at the top of Lindkogel! A well-earned descent ahead of us.
But first things first...there happens to be a restaurant at the top of Lindkogel.
Mandatory beer & apple juice (which actually was some kind of apple wine) -photo
Finally downhill!
More hard core riding
Anu enjoying Lindkogels smooth trail.
It offers also some trickier parts. Nothing too hard, but hard enough to break my chain-guide.
The track is marked as “black”, but it's 99% like this.
Very doable for a hardtail bike.
In the end the trail got wider and rockier
Sun & trees
Back in Baden, where to next?
Wine fields are always a safe bet
The party was still going on…
More sturm, this time from white grapes. This was so much better than the red stuff. A bit like Finnish lonkero.
We also got some local food, small "knödel"s and some stuff I think was made of blood
Few hours later lost in another wine field
We bought a two-liter bottle of sturm from the very last wine producer before Mödling
At home we found out that there was no cork in the bottle! Luckily I didn’t spill it more. Actually, this was the reason why I never had drunk sturm before. With traditional methods it’s not possible to store sturm and therefore you can't buy it from Finland or Sweden. I think it's available only around wine growing areas from early September to late October.
