The Schmittenhöhe summit

The Schmittenhöhe is the reason Zell am See works as a two-hour session: you can be at the lakeshore and at two thousand metres inside half an hour. Several cable cars go up — the cityXpress leaves from the edge of the town itself, the Schmittenhöhebahn from the Schmittental — and the top is grassy and walkable rather than rocky, so there is somewhere to stand in every direction.

The summit's own landmark is the Elisabethkapelle, a small white chapel of 1907 that photographs well against snow and against summer meadow alike. South and west the horizon fills with the Hohe Tauern: on a clear day the Grossglockner, Austria's highest mountain, stands among about thirty peaks over three thousand metres, and a panorama board on the terrace names them.

This is an afternoon mountain. The last two hours of daylight rake the summit meadows and put the shadow of the ridge across the lake far below; midday is flat and hazy, and cloud tends to build on the Tauern from late morning in summer. In winter it is a ski area, so shoot early or away from the pistes, and dress for a wind that is always ten degrees colder than the town.

The cable cars run summer and winter, but they close for maintenance in the shoulder weeks of spring and autumn and stop in high wind — check the day's operation before building a session on being up here.