Around the Wank

The Wank is a favored hiking-tourist destination with a peak easily accessible by cable car from Garmisch-Partenkirchen. However, this loop circling around the entire mountain skips the peak and the crowds to follow a remote, moderately technical trail across the mountain’s steep southern slope that is hardly the width of a foot – offering stunning vistas of the Wetterstein and Karwendel mountain ranges. Returning to the town from the north finishes the run along a delightful, downward-sloping flow trail.

Climbing up below the cable car, the steep track soon reaches altitude around 300m higher, where a wide forest track becomes smaller and smaller. Across the valley, beyond Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany’s highest peaks form a beautiful view with the Zugspitze abruptly delimiting the Wetterstein mountain range.

The trail soon requires full concentration as it narrows to the width of a foot crossing a steep slope, but otherwise presents little difficulty.

You are unlikely to meet another human being until the highest, easternmost point of the loop, with views over the rough Karwendel range, is reached.

Here the path widens out and gently slopes down along a picturesque creek onto the Esterberg Alm, a mountain pasture with an inn.

A perfect flow trail back down to the starting point rounds of one of the best routes in the region with views across the Loisach river valley.