Serles: Great Mountain Guarding the Wipptal & Brenner

The image to the left is of the great mountain called "Serles," which lies just to the south of Innsbruck, Austria, and "guards," so to speak, the entrance to the Stubai Valley (Stubaital) and the Wipp Valley (Wipptal) and the Brenner Pass. About 20 miles to the south of Serles is the Italian-Austrian frontier.

Serles can be climbed without great difficulty, though the last stretch to the peak is a bit challenging. I climbed this mountain on Sonnwendtag (Summer Solstice) in June of 1968 with my Austrian friend Caecilia Werth and some of her companions from the neighboring village of Matrei-am-Brenner. The view from the peak of Serles is truly "herrlich," awesome. One can see the Inn River Valley, the city of Innsbruck, as well as the peaks of the Kalkkoegel, the fantastic limestone mountains by Axamer-Lizum, the ski area featured in the Innsbruck Olympics.

Innsbruck, Austria & Notre Dame

This past year four of my old friends (and their spouses) came to Chardon to help celebrate my daughter Julia's wedding: Tom Heinen, Tim Forward, Chris Cotter, and Mike Gerrity. They joined Coughlin and Kleppel family members and friends for a joyous wedding celebration.

These dear friends and I studied together at the University of Notre Dame in 1966-67, and then in Salzburg and Innsbruck, Austria the following year. We have enough stories to blackmail everyone but Heinen.

The Notre Dame Innsbruck program was an incredible blessing for all of us. We still have many close friends from those years (36 guys in total studied in Innsbruck in '67-'68). I will write about them from time to time (and the blackmail stories are safe with me and will never see the light of day, especially the story about Tim Forward in Obergurgl--unless I am waterboarded).

Skiing in Colorado

About six weeks ago we visited our daughter Carolan in Frisco, Colorado, and skied with her at Copper Mountain. This was the first skiing I did on a large mountain since 1968, when I was a "student" in Innsbruck, Austria. I wondered if I could still ski and also wondered if the altitude would affect me. Luckily, I could indeed still ski, and wasn't too affected by the incredible altitude--the peaks at Copper Mountain are nearly 11,000 feet. The last time I was at this elevation was in May or June of 1968, when Tim Forward and I climbed the glacier on the Austrian Mountain called Zuckerhuettl ("Sugar Shack"). Tim and I climbed the mountain glacier on skis; the last hundred yards or so, we took off our skis and climbed by foot up the steep "horn" of this great mountain on the Austrian-Italian border in the Stubai Valley (Stubaital). Tim got terribly sunburned in this adventure. Luckily, he did wear sunglasses, so there was no eye damage.

During our 4-day visit to Colorado, we visited towns like Leadville, Breckenridge, Vail, and Boulder. I was impressed by all the wonderful public art in these places. Posted above is a photo of a sculpture of jackasses we encountered in Breckenridge. I will be on the right in this photo; the jackasses on the left.