The Great Hike around the Pragser Wildsee

Doing an extensive 1-day hike close to the Pragser Wildsee (Italy) was beautiful, so although the lake itself is flooded by tourists on all days of the week, the paths get quickly silent as soon as you leave the main tourist routes. Let me show you how we did it in summer 2019.

We slept in the car on the official Pragser Wildsee Parking. While this is not the ideal way of doing it since the parking is quite expensive, be aware that the road to the lake is blocked during summer season from 10am to 3pm. This means, you either need to drive up outside of these hours, or you take the shuttle bus. This video shows you quite nicely what you need to know.

We first had the plan to do an extensive route via the Weisslahnscharte - Grosser Rosskopf and then surrounding the Seekofel + Karspitze. However, as you can see from the sign below, this trail is currently blocked. We nevertheless wanted to give it a try since we didn’t know where the block actually took place.

Therefore, we started early in the morning, hiking up towards the Weisslahnscharte, after roughly 45 min we met some folks that were fixing the trails. They told us that our plan was not feasible. We therefore returned back to the lake in order to execute our alternative plan. Let me emphasize here that these guys that are taking care of all the hiking trails are doing an amazing job! Thanks a lot for all your hard work so that we can do the hikes!

Back at the lake, we headed south on the crowded tourist path that is surrounding the lake and then climbed up the ridge before we headed west in order to surround the Seekofel peak. All in all our trip took us the whole day, included over 20 kilometers and according to Gaia, more than 2000 altitude meters that you need to climb up and down.

You can download our GPX file here in zip format: rockn-roll-pragser-wildsee

Conclusion

Great trip, got more challenging towards the middle/end part, don’t underestimate the elevation, we saw some folks struggling with this a lot in the end. Check out locally whether the Weisslahnscharte Trail is open again before climbing up, saves you 500m altitude.

Pictures