Shortly afterwards, we come to the actual climbing path. Using a ten-metre ladder on a vertical rock face, we descend into an abandoned slate quarry and slate gallery. Generations of the roof and wall slate quarried here. At the end of the Second World War, the tunnels provided shelter for the population. He himself, he tells me, spent many of his first days of life in one of these tunnels. And I can see and imagine how much work it was. He tells me how they used to pour concrete here and how they used wheelbarrows to transport all the concrete down the mountain, and that over 100 metres of steel cables were used here. At the bottom, you can still see an old slate pit and a slate wall from that time. "Pure dramaturgy," says Karl Rainer. On our way back, I get to know Karl Rainer a bit more from his private side, his childhood in Mittelstrimmig, his former political interests, his many travels, and his second hobby: archaeology, another favourite subject besides hiking. As it turns out, he is a gifted connoisseur of the Celtic and Roman periods. Unforgettable is the discovery of a Roman coin hoard with about 25000 Roman coins, in which he was allowed to participate.