Säntis

This weekend's story once again begins with the overwhelming generosity of our hostel hostess, Marianne. She was not going to be using her car this weekend, so she practically forced us to use it. So, we loaded up the blue Subaru wagon, and set forth with road map in hand.

Despite a noticeable lack of knowledge of laws like the unposted freeway speed-limit and proper round-about etiquette, we arrived safely and without major incident at a little town called Wasserauen, from where we took a chair lift to the beginning of our hike. The weather was pleasant, although a little foggy, our bags were light because we could leave most of our things in the car, and our destination, Säntis, was calling.

Once again, I'll skip over most of the four-hour hike because the pictures give a better description than I can, so we'll pick up the story three and a half hours in. We knew we were getting close to our destination, but because of the fog we really had no idea how close. All we could see was a big snow field in front of us so, learning from past experiences, we switched from our light-footed running shoes to our heavy-duty hiking boots and started the climb. As we ascended with hardly an idea where we were going, the weather gradually became colder, dropping to a frigid 3.5 degrees Celsius (or roughly 40 degrees Fahrenheit). Finally, we came to a 'T' in the hiking path and, not having any signs to guide us, we had to make a decision: climb the peak to the left or climb the peak to the right. We climbed the left peak, which turned out to be the correct peak, and entered the tourist trap known as Säntis.

Our hike to Säntis took us four hours. Most people's lift rides to Säntis took them four minutes. So, we did not have a real solid mountain-top experience this time (unless your idea of a mountain-top experience involves eating nuts—a popular hiking staple in the Burgers' hiking supplies—in a warm restaurant above a souvenir shop) but the fact that we conquered the mountain was good enough for me.

Sleet began to fall as we left. Then, the fog lifted, and we saw a huge weather tower on the top of Säntis, one so big that it not only would have make the choice glaringly obvious which of the two peaks to climb, but would have shown us exactly where we were going through the snow fields. In fact, three hours later when we reached our starting point again, we could still plainly see the tower in the distance.



Having finished our Saturday adventure, we crawled back into the car, found a nice little place to eat pizza, and then went off in search of a good place to sleep for the night...