More Hiking Adventures

The plan for this weekend was more hiking.

Marianne (the lady that runs the hostel) and Daniel offered their home in Glarus as our home base for this weekend, so we rode down with them on Friday night, chilled out for a while and slept. In the morning, we were treated to a fantastic breakfast and a pretty solid lunch before heading out for our Saturday afternoon hike. Our weekend plan included a pretty difficult pass on Sunday so we were planning on taking it easy on Saturday.

We jumped on a lift in the early afternoon which took us from the slightly foggy city of Enninda halfway up a very foggy mountain. There was a point on the lift where I could probably only see five feet away from myself. But where the lift stopped it was a little more clear, and we started hiking.

Our hosts told us we should have hiking boots and lent us some of theirs, and we started out in those. After about fifteen minutes of climbing, Travis and I both decided that the boots were ridiculous and we were better off in our running shoes. And as we climbed more, it became very evident why our hosts urged us to wear them: despite the fact that they feel like somebody tied a ball and chain to our feet, the boots kept our feet very, very dry. Without them our feet were soaked within minutes. We climbed a ways more before deciding we had gone far enough, seen enough and wanted to conserve our energy for the next day, so we hiked back down.

That night, we played a sweet game of Cuboro.

Sunday morning started early. We rose before sunrise, ate some breakfast and headed toward the train station, which took us to a bus station, which took us to a road, which took us to a chair lift. Or a Sielbahn if you understand German. I don't. We learned our lesson the day before, so we put on the dry ball-and-chain hiking boots that we borrowed from our hosts and started trudging.



Our trail started up a big mountain covered in white. But not snow—sheep. There was even a shepherd in the field. Many of the sheep were standing on our path, so Travis had to shoo them away before we climbed up the mountain. As we continued to ascend, crossing several roaring rivers on the way, the views just continued to get better. And, as we continued to ascend, the path went from dry to muddy, to a little bit snowy, to really snowy. And then, the path stopped. Well, at least the tracks of other hikers from earlier this year. We could not see the path anymore, because all we could see is snow. We decided, however that we wouldn't let the snow stop us, so we searched around for the trail markers on the rocks and started blazing our own trail through the snow. First, the snow was up to our ankles. A few hundred feet more, up to our boots. Up to our knees. Finally, up to our hips. We were so close to the pass, but we decided it was just too dangereous, since the original trail blazers probably had ropes and not school backpacks; or else went in August. So in the end we decided that we would let the snow stop us.



We came back down to the chairlift, and my feet were screaming "Get me out of these boots!" and if you know me, I don't often argue with my feet when they are screaming, so I obliged. We sat at the chair lift for a while, occassionally using what was probably the second phone Alexander Graham Bell made, spinning a dial to make it ring, calling the bottom hoping somebody would answer to bring us down. But nobody did, so we decided to take the hour-long trail toward the bottom. There was no way our feet were going back in those hiking boots, though, so we laced up our running shoes and started hiking. Our feet were so happy to be in running shoes again, they practically floated down the hill until we started jogging down the path, jumping from rock to rock, taking rivers in a single bound and balancing on tree trunks until we reached the bottom. Then, another bus, a few more trains, a stop in Zurich for some kababs (!!!), and we were back home at the Hostel.

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