The book “The Other Alps” by Wolfgang Heitzmann, who was born in Steyr, was published just in time for Christmas. Heitzmann wrote a cultural history of the Alps on almost 400 pages and presents 230 hiking destinations between the Côte d’Azur and the Vienna Woods.
This volume takes you through half a billion years, from the birth of the Alps to the “Little Ice Age” in the 19th century. Geological curiosities are presented as well as little-known cultural treasures, primeval routes or enigmatic stone monuments.
Where did dinosaurs walk on Mont Blanc? How did primeval miners live? And where is Europe’s great mountain range still wild? Heitzmann provides answers to these and other questions in the book. Where are the Alps still really wild? For example in the Reichraminger Hintergebirge, which has its place in the book just like the Gesäuse or the Dead Mountains. Today the oldest beech trees in the Alps are rooted in the Reichraminger Hintergebirge, about the Gesäuse one can read: “If landscape is music”, wrote the Viennese teacher Egid Filek von Wittinghausen in 1924, “then the Gesäuse is a wonderfully built, magnificently enhanced stone symphony.” In a guest article, National Park Limestone Alps veteran Franz Sieghartsleiter writes about wilderness, lynx and stepping stones.
Born in Steyr, Wolfgang Heitzmann has written a total of 80 books to date. The author lived in the old town of Eisenstadt until he completed his German and geography studies. He was there when the Reichraminger Hintergebirge was occupied in 1984 and later helped to set up the Kalkalpen National Park. Heitzmann was also involved in the decentralized state exhibition “Land of Hammers – Heimat Eisenwurzen” in 1998 and for ten years supervised a traveling column in the OÖN called “Natur aktiv”. In the meantime, the passionate hiker has ended up in Tyrol, but Heitzmann regularly comes to his home in Upper Austria as a mountain grandfather for his grandchildren.
- Everything about the book: die-anderen-alpen.com
Source: Nachrichten
