This place is simply a must see! It's a canyon with aqua waters rushing through it. It's simply beautiful. With that said, I'm glad you're reading this because it will allow you to plan your trip better than I did. The Leutascher Geisterklamm (LG) can be accessed from either Germany in the east or Austria in the west. Like 90% of it is in Austria and you can walk from one end (country) to the other. However, both countries will give you a very different experience. We parked on the Austrian side for €5 and walked the length of it and back, a distance of 3.9 miles (6.3km). It took 2 hours and 45 minutes, which was unfortunately about 2 hours 15 minutes longer than we thought it would take to see this. Starting from the Austrian side, you walk about 15 minutes before the trail starts to go downhill. A few minutes later you will reach the canyon edge where you'll walk on a metal walkway bolted to the cliff face for most of the length of the canyon. You can see the water rushing about 100 meters below you, and it's beautiful. However you can see through the metal walkway so it may not be the place to go if you are afraid of heights. Eventually, after the second bridge, the path goes up into the woods before descending to the canyon floor on the German side.
At this point, on the German side, you get a completely different experience of the gorge. For €3, you can walk just a few feet above the rushing waters deep down in the canyon. You may have seen this on Pinterest. It's cool being so deep in the canyon and seeing the water up close- it's beautiful! The path going into the gorge from this side is much shorter and finishes with a waterfall. You can then hike back to the top of the canyon and back to your car in Austria. You can either go back the way you came or take a shorter, more direct path that does not allow you views of the gorge; we took the latter.
Here's the thing though. You could make the case this is better than the Austrian side. Personally, I think neither is better than the other. With that said, the Austrian side is more equipped for tourists with the parking lot and stuff, the German side is MUCH easier to get to, especially from where you leave your car. The problem with the German side is there's no parking to speak of, just a few cars pulled over on the side of the road. Also the road it's on is so small it's easy to overlook. Driving over from the Austrian side, there's one sign for it, but it's easy to miss.
So that's the thing. Decide how much time and energy you want to spend seeing this the decide to a) see the Austrian side, b) see the German side or c) spend half the day seeing both sides. No matter what you do though, it'll be worth it. read more