I'll begin at the beginning. We were up for breakfast at 7AM. Talking with the hut manager about our route he suggested that we should do the remainder of the Jubilaeumssteig since the section to the Prinz-Luitpold-Haus (PLH) was not particularly difficult or exposed and the other route would take 3h longer.
We set off at 7:45 with the temp at 2C and into driving sleet. There was slush on the ground from the hut onwards; not enough to make hiking difficult, but enough to make it unpleasant. We went over a first saddle into a howling gale that almost knocked us over. However, the wind dropped off quickly as we dropped down the other side, and for the next few hours as we traversed around mountainsides the weather remained pretty constantly crappy but not catastrophic.
Finally, after seeing various herds of chamois deer (Gemse), and a herd of sheep that insisted on walking ahead of us along the path for several minutes, we arrived at the Bockscharte, the final pass we needed to cross before reaching the PLH.
Problem: the pass was a couple of hundred meters above where we had been hiking, and above the snowfall line. As we hiked up the pass the slush changed to snow, and then the snow got deeper and the path got more difficult to discern. Soon we were struggling up vaguely intuited trails in 20cm of snow
