Germany's highest mountain straddles a border and once argued about its own height
The Zugspitze, named for the paths avalanches carve down it, tops out at 2,962 metres, a figure the summit cafe's lounge now carries as its name. Estimates once varied by nearly 300 metres. The border with Austria crosses the summit, where a checkpoint once stood.
The Zugspitze crowns the Wetterstein range of the Northern Limestone Alps, rising about eleven kilometres southwest of Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria. Its western summit carries the border, so the massif is shared between Bavaria and Austria's Tyrol, the municipalities of Grainau and Ehrwald. There were once three peaks, east, middle and west. Published heights ranged from 2,690 to 2,970 metres until the Bavarian State Survey Office settled on 2,962, measured against the Amsterdam gauge; Austria reaches the same number using the Trieste gauge, which sits 27 centimetres lower.
Josef Naus made the first recorded ascent on 27 August 1820 with his survey assistant Maier and guide Johann Georg Tauschl. Climbers now use three normal routes, and the knife-edged Jubilee Ridge is one of the best known ridge walks in the Eastern Alps. Those who prefer comfort have three cable cars and a rack railway tunnelled through the northern flank. The first cable car, built in 1926, stopped on a ridge below the top until its terminus moved to the summit in 1991. The staffed border post is gone, thanks to the Schengen zone.
Weather hits hard here, because the mountain is the first high barrier facing the westerly winds and moist air piles up against it. Its climate is classed as tundra, and it holds Germany's only glacier, which has been shrinking. In the 1961 to 1990 reference period it averaged 2,003.1 mm of precipitation a year and a mean temperature of minus 4.8 degrees. Records include minus 35.6 degrees on 14 February 1940, a gust of 335 km/h on 12 June 1985, and 8.3 metres of snow in April 1944.
The rock began as seabed sediment in the Mesozoic, with muschelkalk below and Upper Triassic Wetterstein limestone forming walls up to 800 metres high. On the karst plateau of the Zugspitzplatt, glaciers left dolines, limestone pavements and moraines, and shepherds have grazed flocks there since the 16th century; about 400 sheep still do.
Source: Zugspitze
