I Climbed My First Via Ferrata on ZERO Sleep | Großer Donnerkogel, Austria

7 hours. Night drive. 30 minutes of sleep. And somehow we still made it to the top. This is the story of my first via ferrata ever — Intersport Klettersteig Donnerkogel (C/D) in Gosau, Austria. It started with a hike from Gosausee lake up to the Gosaukammbahn cable car, a chance encounter with a fellow climber heading the same way, and a slow realization that maybe — just maybe — we had no idea what we were getting into. The first three stages are stunning and doable. Then comes Stage 4. The Himmelsleiter — a 40-meter vertical steel ladder bolted straight into the rock face. That part I genuinely loved. We pushed through to the summit cross at 2,054 m, took in the view, and ended the day the only way that made sense: jumping into the ice-cold Gosausee. Spoiler: it was more "cold water therapy" than swimming. This is a long video — it's mostly a personal memory of a trip that started as a random idea from Germany and turned into one of the best days I've had this year. If you don't want to watch everything, feel free to jump to the chapters below and pick what interests you most. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ CHAPTERS ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 0:00-03:13 – Hiking from Gosausee to Gosaukammbahn (1,550 m) 03:56 – Meeting a fellow climber & gearing up 07:29 – Via ferrata begins – Stages 1–3 (B/C) 45:48 – Stage 4: Himmelsleiter (ladder to heaven) (C/D) 1:16:37 – Summit cross at 2,054 m 1:18:54 – Cooling off in Gosausee ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ GEAR I USE ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 📷 Camera: DJI Osmo Action 5 Pro → https://amzn.to/48Qxdak ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ #viaferrata #donnerkogel #austria #klettersteig #gosau #himmelsleiter #salzkammergut #climbingaustria #alpineclimbing #outdooraustria #mountainvlog #travelvlog #petrroprotravel