A Strange Museum To a Mountain Pass You Can’t Get to
By Michael Frank, Adventure Journal on December 20th, 2011
8,172-feet up, at the summit of the Timmelsjoch Toll Road that leads to the Austrian border with Italy, is a new museum that’s only open in summer; the pass is buried by more than 30 feet of snow every winter. The museum looks totally strange, like a very cool space pod, for some reason crashed to earth in this remote, nearly lunar landscape. Its architect, Austrian Werner Tscholl, made the new building to resemble a boulder just about to tip downhill, so he perched it precariously right above the penultimate curve of the road. Inside, the cavelike museum commemorates the work it took in the 1950s to build the curvy, steep Timmelsjoch, a favorite of hard core cyclists when the pass finally clears in late May.
