Mittagstein – Knofeleben – water pipeline path

From the parking lot, walk towards the factory grounds and follow the road to the right until you reach the narrow "Lokalbahnstraße", where you turn left toward the former station and pass it on a footpath on the left. You cross the dilapidated track system and then a driveway to climb up an embankment to another gravel path that leads uphill diagonally to the left. After about 80 m, a discreet pull path branches off to the right into the forest, which you should not miss, then after another 100 meters follow a footpath uphill to the left into the forest, which further up crosses a gravel path (embankment with wooden railing). You climb higher on the path through a light pine forest in steep hairpin bends to a T-junction, where a path forks downhill to the left. Here you keep right, so at the following fork you do not continue straight but branch left and uphill (cairns, old red-dot markings). The path now leads steeply uphill to a saddle with a beautiful view and then turns right to lead further steeply uphill just below the rocky ridge (red-dot markings). You essentially follow the course of the ridge upwards until the rocky summit of Mittagstein is visible on the right, which you climb at the edge of the escarpment.

From the summit of Mittagstein, you walk back a few meters and then turn right into the forest to follow a clearly visible path that first goes downhill a bit and then uphill for a longer time to the plateau of Feichtaberg, whose highest point lies unspectacularly in the forest. From Feichtaberg, you continue north on a path to a large clearing, at the edge of which a driveway passes. Here turn left, and after a few meters turn right again onto a pull path that leads past a forester's house of the city of Vienna and later reaches a hunting lodge. Shortly after the hunting lodge, another driveway is crossed, and after a few meters, you turn right again (signpost "Knofeleben"). You follow a clearly defined pull path until shortly before the large clearing on which the Naturfreundehaus Knofeleben stands, where you reach a driveway with marking, which you follow to the right to the shelter.

For the descent, walk towards "Reichenau/Rax" on a forest road to the first left curve, where the marking branches off downhill to the right into the forest in the direction of "Kaiserbrunn". This path, also called "Miesleitensteig", first leads steeply over rocky terrain and later through the forest to Kaiserbrunn, where you cross the federal highway and turn left onto the well-signposted water pipeline path. This path initially runs parallel to the road and soon somewhat away from it on the orographic right side of the Schwarza, and after a significant ascent returns down to a wooden bridge over the Schwarza. Then the road is crossed, and the nicely constructed path leads on the left side of the Schwarza over several small ascents to the outskirts of Hirschwang, where you cross the riverbed behind the weir and then return to the starting point on the sidewalk.