This past weekend I was in Norway and I started getting a bit sicker each of the three days. Yesterday my voice started deteriorating and by the evening I was just squeaking like Mickey Mouse. This morning I stayed home from work to sleep and drink tea. Because I was home alone I wasn't talking, so it wasn't until the afternoon that I realized that I couldn't talk at all (some would say a good thing). So tomorrow I will go to the doc to have him throat me with a stick.
Ok, so I am going to try and go back and pick up from like the middle of July where I had stopped before, but there is a lot so it is likely that I won't get things caught up to the now...
Weekend 6:
Two of the past interns that had been here told us of this hype hike. They had done it the previous year and it was one of their highlights of Switzerland and so they wanted to do it again. So I was sweet lets do it. There were about 13 of us that did it I think. So caught an early morning train from Baden and switched a couple times and got to this mountain. It was a phenomenal hike. The mountains in Switzerland are pretty similar to the mountains in Canada, but still different and cool. One of my favorite things about them is the meadows. There are huge green grassy meadows along the mountain slopes with yellow and purple and white wildflowers growing in them. The cows and sheep just wander the mountainside, all of them with big bells around their neck. Now the bells are something I question. Why so many? I haven't personally looked, but some of my friends have looked up the cost of them and they are pretty expensive, but their are fields with 100 cows that have them. Also, can the cows hear them or have they just completely blocked out the sound because that is all they hear all the time? I don't know these things yet.
Anyway the hike was supposed to take 6 hours. Our destination was the Wildstruble Hut. This is a mountain hut that had accommodation and served a big supper and breakfast the next morning.
So we hiked for the first two and half hours until we got up to this little lake where we were going to stop for lunch. I was soaked in sweat (this was my first big hike of the year and so I wasn't in the fittest shape yet) by the time we got to the lake and wanted to go for a dip. There is more of a long story about the swimming process, but the just of it is that I went for a nice skinny dip to cool off and after I came out three of my friends thought it was a good idea but they were shocked by how cold it was and immediately climbed back out. It had been nice and sunny all morning, but just as we were finishing our lunch it started to rain super hard and then hail for a bit out of no where. We quickly ran to this little hut beside the lake to take shelter. The rain stopped in like 10 minutes and then we continued back on the hike. So this is where things got off track, but not where we noticed it. You see the interns that had done the hike before thought that they would remember it so they didn't bring a map. The rest of us that were joining them thought they knew what they were doing so we hadn't brought anything or looked into the hike much. So as we start walking along the path, a heavy fog comes in and slowly these two guys start saying that things don't look that familiar to them. But we are walking on a path and it is foggy and they didn't seem that sure about anything so we just keep going. At one point we come to a sign that says Wildstrubel so we think we must be on the right trail even though they still say that they don't recognize anything. So we walk for another three hours from the lake, all in heavy fog, and we are starting to think more and more that something isn't right. Because there are 13 people, there are different fitness levels. So the fitter people are pushing on ahead, but the slower people can't keep up and are stopping to take more breaks. But because the fog was thick we didn't want to split up. So the fast people would hike for five minutes, then stop and wait for five minutes for the slower people to catch up, and then wait another five minutes for the slower people to rest. We recognized that we weren't sure if we were going the right way, but that we wouldn't make it at this pace even if we were. So 3 of us (me included) decided to split off from the group and go ahead faster to try and see what we can find. If we hike and the trail ends then we would come back, but hopefully we would find the hut and then come back and tell the others to follow. There had already been talks of turning around and going back, but I had been fighting them as much as possible because I was determined to get to this hut. So the three of us hiked past the others for about an hour until finally we hear some voices over this ridge. Two French people were coming down. So we meet them and I say 'Wildstrubel Hut?' and point to where they just came from and then nod but kind of uncertainly. So I motion out hut for a place to sleep. And then they say no Wildstuble top (as in the summit). They then explained to us that we were like 8km away from the hut, and it was on a different mountain on the other side of a glacier from where we were and we couldn't cross it without gear. Apparently we had started on the wrong trail right from the lake. As for why they named it Wildstrubel Hut when it isn't on Wildstrubel Mountain, I'll never know. So we turned around and hiked back and by the time we got to where we had left the group, they weren't there. So we decided they must have turned around and went back down so we continued down. We caught up to them at the lake. One of them had phone reception and one had our GPS coordinated on his watch, so they had called someone and asked them to look up the GPS coordinates of the hut and realized that we were on the wrong mountain.
So we hiked down to the bottom of the mountain, but because it was like 7 in the evening by this point, the local bus had stopped going so we had to walk back into town to catch the train. We had asked a lady we met on the mountain and she said it would be a one hour walk. I walked for about 45 minutes with one guy, realized that we were still super far away and then decided to hitch hike. We got picked up by about the 4th car and they drove us right to the train stop, getting there about 2 minutes before the train left.
So it was a long day, and not the day we had planned, but a good day. I will definitely do the hike again, but next time I'll take a map and actually get to the hut. I loved it.
Weekend 8:
After Wildstrubel, I was loving the Swiss countryside and wanting more. I had booked to do canyoning with some other interns. Canyoning is an extreme way of getting down a river
ASIDE: I just went and got another hot water with honey and lemon to go along with my baby crackers. Once I finish it I am going to bed to sleep because I'm feeling worn down and want to get over this sickness.
So canyoning is a combination of climbing down waterfalls, repelling down waterfalls, sliding down waterfalls and jumping down waterfalls.
Anyway, so we had booked to do an 8 hour canyoning trip Sunday and had booked accommodation for Saturday night, so I went down to Interlacken (two in between two lakes that is like the adventure capital of Switzerland) early Saturday morning and did a hike by myself. Again I was blown away. I just loved the little towns in the steep mountain valleys and the clouds sitting at different levels as I hiked up through and past them. One of the notable enjoyable parts of the hike was when I got to the top after hiking for like 4 hours (very strenuous, going up 1.5km in elevation I think) and it was misty out and I had to go to the bathroom so I went up to this big square building to look for toilets and I find...a dairy barn. Now of all the places to put a dairy barn, I don't know why a person would pick the top of a mountain, but the Swiss do make some of the best cheese and chocolate, so maybe I shouldn't be questioning their methods.
That evening when I got into the town area of Interlacken I found out that the river levels were two high from rain and that it wasn't safe to do the canyoning and that it would probably be canceled. So the next day they confirmed that it was indeed canceled and so I adventured on another hike in the area with another guy this time. We rode a crazy powerful little train up the side of this mountain. We went up 1km in elevation and so it was super steep the whole way. I was impressed with the train. From where we got off, we walked along the plateau overlooking the two lakes and Interlacken and the valley on the other side for the next 6 hours. It was mostly a flat with only a couple of little ups and downs. Again, amazing views and beautiful meadows and some cows.
So that concludes July weekends. Today it is Sept 14, so I still have some catching up to do, but hopefully I can do a recap of my August weekends. Tomorrow I will go to a doc to ask him what to do. I wanted to play guitar tonight, but it would have been hard not to be able to sing at all.
Ta
without wax
No comments:
Post a Comment