Grossglockner
— — the pyramid the road climbs to find.
Not only on a wall.
“The highest summit in Austria, 3,798 metres above the Hohe Tauern range. A sharp pyramid of dark schist on the Carinthia–East Tyrol border, with the Pasterze glacier sliding off its eastern flank. The Grossglockner High Alpine Road climbs to the Kaiser-Franz-Josefs-Höhe terrace at 2,369 metres, where the mountain stops feeling distant. Marmots whistle in the meadows below the pass.
Grossglockner, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Grossglockner is the highest mountain in Austria, rising to 3,798 metres on the border between the states of Carinthia and East Tyrol. It is the chief peak of the Glockner Group in the Hohe Tauern range of the Eastern Alps and the highest point in Hohe Tauern National Park, the largest national park in the Alps. The Pasterze, Austria's longest glacier at about eight kilometres, descends from the mountain's eastern face. The first recorded ascent was on 28 July 1800, led by Prince-Bishop Franz Xaver von Salm-Reifferscheidt.
Most visitors meet the mountain from the Grossglockner High Alpine Road, a forty-eight-kilometre toll route built between 1930 and 1935 that climbs from Bruck or Heiligenblut over the Hochtor Pass at 2,504 metres. The road spur ends at the Kaiser-Franz-Josefs-Höhe terrace at 2,369 metres, looking directly across at the summit and down onto the Pasterze. It is open seasonally, generally early May to early November, and closes overnight. Climbing the peak itself is a roped glacier route from the Stüdlhütte or Erzherzog-Johann-Hütte, normally undertaken with a mountain guide.
The high road is a summer mountain. The pass clears of snow by early May in most years and closes again with the first heavy autumn storms in early November, giving roughly six months of access. Late June through mid-September is when the glacier viewpoint is most reliably clear and the alpine meadows are in flower; edelweiss and gentian peak in July. The Pasterze glacier has retreated more than two kilometres since measurements began in the 1850s, and roughly fifty metres in length each recent year.