Grossglockner is the highest mountain in Austria, a rock pyramid of 3,798 metres on the border of Carinthia and Tyrol, and the way to its foot is a road of thirty-six hairpins. It runs 48 kilometres from Bruck to Heiligenblut and crests in the Hochtor tunnel at 2,504 metres, cut in 1935. The reason it exists is not the view. It was dug through the hungry years after 1929 as work for some 3,200 unemployed labourers, five summers of it, under an engineer named Franz Wallack. The lower bends go through open pasture loud with cowbells, cattle grazing among larch and alpenrose, marmots bolting between the rocks as your car passes. Higher up the grass gives out and the road crosses bare tundra, and when you come out of the tunnel on the Carinthian side the whole southern range and its glacier valleys open ahead of you.
The mountain lets the road in for about half the year. From early November the gates lock and up to ten metres of snow bury the hairpins. In late April or early May the rotary snow blowers Wallack designed cut it open again, throwing back drifts that stand metres high at the passes, and the snow decides the date. Campgrounds and huts sit around Heiligenblut on the valley floor, where the pyramid fills the skyline at dawn and at dusk and the nights are silent except for wind and running meltwater. The road's far spur ends at the Franz-Josefs-Höhe, a terrace looking straight down onto the Pasterze, the longest glacier in the country, with the peak standing behind it. A funicular drops you from the terrace toward the ice. When it opened in 1963 it reached the glacier. The ice has since pulled back some 300 metres from the lower station and thins by about two metres a year, so the walk down to the edge is longer every summer than the last.