To the top of Ulm Cathedral

We're still playing catch up with our posts, so here's an update to how we spent our Sunday last weekend.

Our friends, Veronica and Jason, rented a car and took us on a tour of the sites not far out of Esslingen.

Our first stop was Ulm, a town only an hour outside of Esslingen. The most popular attraction here was the Ulm Cathedral - the tallest cathedral in the world at 521ft. What makes it additionally special is you can climb to the very top of the 521ft spire...and the staircases are not indoors.

It was a foggy day, which is normally considered a negative when site seeing. When testing the limits of your fear of heights, it's very much a positive.  It also makes for some fabulous photography. As you can see above, the last third of the spire was engulfed in clouds.

We started out touring the interior of the Cathedral. The first foundation stone was laid in 1377, although many issues arose during the construction, and while functional, the church was not fully completed until 513 years later, in 1890.

We began our ascent up the 768 stairs. The staircases were a spiral all the way to the top, with large windowless openings in the stone, partitioned by steel bars so it was more difficult to fall out. The spiral was very constricted. Along the lower walls of our ascent were hundreds of carvings and etchings - many dating back to the early 1900's and some, like this one, to the late 1800's. (1877)

The staircases were broken up into segments of a few hundred. At our first stop was the above room, lined in early sketches and photographs of all the major cathedrals in the world. In the center was the bell chamber, which had viewing glasses to the bells below.

The bells.

A couple tiers later, we reached the final set to the steeple. Previously, we had been twisting up staircases that were just wide enough to fit 2 people. At the next stage, the stairs narrowed to the width of one person. This meant if someone was coming down, both of you had to put your backs to a wall and shimmy along each other (We got the opportunity to try this. It was terrifying.)

As scary as it was this high up, the fog floating through the carved out walls was beautiful.

Kara expresses her love for the final ascent. I also forgot to mention it was just above freezing and everything was wet. The twisting stone to the right in this photo is actually the "hand rail," and although those look like windows, there's no glass there. Just big hollow openings.

We reach the top! Everyone is thoroughly terrified, wet, and freezing. Through the fog you can barely make out the tops of buildings below, and the platform we have to stand on is only about 20" wide.

We made our way back down, which turned out to be even more disorienting then the way up. I was fighting off my body's urge to break into a paralyzed fear based panic the whole way. Once you make it half way, you realize that the lower staircases were actually spacious in comparison. Above is a scale model of the cathedral in the center of Ulm. All in all, it was the best experience yet.

Just last night we got back from our trip to Italy and Switzerland. We've got more photos to sort through, so we'll get them up as soon as we can.

- Dave