This trip report follows this one:
I return tired but energized from my trip to the Alpstein; dinner is all about stories of trails and valleys and the lovely Appenzeller people.
I brought back a piece of cheese and aunt Rosmarie stores the twice bagged smelly thing into a Tupperware to save her fridge.
The following day is hot and humid and after a few morning phone calls a dinner with my other uncle's family is set up. I will get there by bus and train and please deliver a bowl of ripe strawberries and some empty glass bottles and a few other items that need to make it back to that side of the family. Dinner at my cousin's is a delicious barbecue with sausages and kabobs and grilled cheeses and veggies in their garden, with uncle Louis and aunt Marthi and the kids and more cousins and dog Charlie. We have a great visit .
That night I pack again after picking my next starting point: the station of Attinghausen in Canton Uri. From there I will hike up to the Surenenpass and enter the Engelberg valley. After that I don't know, we'll see. I do not pack for any rain gear and leave my fleece behind. I do pack my light synthetic insulation. I never packed any water filtration.
No ticks :) no poison oak:) no critter bags and my pack seems barely there: ready to go.
I leave later than I should have, given the heat, but breakfast is at 7:30 and it's a nice time to be with family. Plus the table is full of bread and butter and home made jams and müsli and granola and cheese and coffee and milk and fruit and dried meats…. How can I pass that up??
On the train from Zürich to Luzern there are at least eight languages and five distinctly different Swiss dialects being spoken in just the car I am in : it seems to work just fine. The first train conductor I have seen since my arrival comes to check tickets. She switches back and forth between Swiss, German, French and English. The train I take in Luzern is small, very colorful with Alps painted on every car. I only hear Swiss being spoken here. Over half the people in it have Deuter day packs, hiking boots and many have trekking poles. Most are over 60 since vacations have not started yet. I sit by an older couple, the woman looks stern, almost a caricature with her tight lips and small glasses. After a while I ask her where they are heading. They are going to check out a hike to see if it is suitable for a group they will be taking out in a couple of weeks. For a while I am thinking they might be naturalists, leading a hike for other folks their age. Then she mentions that the people they are taking need to be able to walk for at least four hours, and not get lost. I just lose the image I had in my mind of outdoorsy people. Are they not frequent hikers? " Oh, they are "behindert"" , which means handicapped or disabled. I am really trying to picture this so I ask in what way they are disabled. " In their souls " she answers. I clearly look confused, not even trying to hide it. She helps " addicts, suicidal, mildly violent people.."
My world just got rearranged a bit. My Swiss is that of a child, since I left at age nine; while I do understand some more sophisticated expressions even if I am not familiar with them, this one had escaped me, so thank you stern looking lady.
At the small train station of Attinghausen I see a few soldiers on green bikes an older lady smoking a cigarette. I ask her the way for the trail that leads up toward the Surenenpass . I get directions and a " sure you want to go up with this heat?" . It is very hot indeed, but I am here now.
The Uri flag is everywhere.
Attinghausen is at about 1540 feet. The Surenenpass is at 7516 feet. It's just up without messing around much from the get go. The first couple of hours are between trees and then they are gone and there is grass and the heat and really no more shade and temps in the low 90's and quite humid.
I am thinking that I better be smart and stop a lot and drink plenty and it becomes my ritual every 15 minutes or so and I keep applying SPF of 60 on my arms and neck and I am wearing my goofy hat. I finally get to a waterfall and get my hat and my bandanna soaking wet. Even better when I reach little snow patches I pack the snow in my hat and let it melt on my head.
I see no one on the trail; they must know better than hike on one of the hottest days in years. That cheese I took with me is not very happy and I am getting some intense whiffs every so often. I packed it in my external pocket in two bags, but still…it is only getting worse so I stop by a snow field and stick it in the snow while I take a break. After it firms up again I eat the whole thing.
I am almost at the pass and the last stretch is all big snow fields and scree.
Looking back
Again
I meet the only other person for the day, an Italian gentleman with a great sense of humor. I never even learned his name but we took a picture of one another.
The sound of waterfalls comes and goes and I don't know if it is the moving air that causes that or if the snow melt is irregular and different amounts of water are coming down.
The other side of the pass is the high end of the Engelberg valley.
I can't see the valley proper yet because it curves around a few times. These mountains are a different animal than the Alpstein. There will be no hopping across valleys and back over. The area is beautiful and instead of following the trail it looks easy to make my own path and visit a few tiny lakes and patches of beautiful azaleas. I go up the northern side, I think, as far as I can till I hit cliffs, then back down and up the other side. So many creeks and cool rock formations.
Time flies and I left my pack on a boulder and I go back and find a nice green shelf I think I might stay for the night but I hear those waterfalls and they are so powerful and inevitable that they unsettle me. I move along a half an hour or so and there are even louder waterfalls so I back up just a few minutes and find a spot in between with a fast moving creek and I think I can deal with that. I skip dinner. No ticks, no poison oak, no big predators, no weird people, it's pretty easy for me to let go and fall asleep. I wake up to distant cow bells . I am up and almost all packed and ready to go but I remind myself that this is it, really. I am in a beautiful place and everything is really lovely and why not make it last a bit longer. So I do. I stretch on the rocks, walk upstream of the creek and take it in.
When I get going I keep steering clear of trails that go down toward the valley. I stop at Blackenalp for goat milk and a new, smaller, piece of cheese. I hike around this interesting range for a couple of hours.
There is no pass, so I am back almost where I started in the morning. I keep as high on the side of the valley as I can for a few hours. It is hot.
Around 7 I find a lovely alp and ask if I can pitch my tent up on their mountain. The friendly woman comes back with a scythe and sharpens it so she can cut the thistles for me. I tell her I can do that myself . She still wants to walk up with me. It's steep and rocky and full of cow patties, or as she said "s'isch überall verschisst". And if I am going to verschiss it myself…please put a big rock on it. Ok, will do.
And then the older woman tells me that her husband will do his "prayer call" at eight and I am welcome to come back down and be there for it. I had heard of it before, how herdsmen in the alps sing/call a prayer out into the mountains, but I had never witnessed it. So I walk back down and the family is outside sitting on benches and grandpa comes out of the house holding a carved milk funnel. He walks up to to an outlook and calls his thanks out through the wooden funnel, in a circle, toward each mountain that surrounds us ; he thanks the "Vater" and Maria and Jesus for the hail and thunder and water and snow and sun and grass life and death. I am thankful for all that in my own way, and for being here at this moment with these people. When it comes to praying, to be outside surrounded by this powerful environment , thanking and appreciating just that is about as appropriate and meaningful as I can imagine.
The old man walks back down and this is when we first talk. He is curious about my plans and later, after I ask for ideas on where to go from here the couple suggests a remote valley they both loved and the pass might be doable too. We talk cheese and I want to buy some from them but still have a piece from the last alp. So I ask if I could just give it to them. Absolutely! The man pulls out his Swiss Army knife and cuts a piece for himself and his wife and his adult son. They know it had suffered a bit from the heat, but they discuss the cheese among themselves: fat content and a lot more.
Next morning I head out first toward the Führenalp and once there instead of going on the lower trail I head up toward the Wissberg and down and up toward the Hahnen and back down since it becomes a "climbing route" almost as low as Horbis ( for those that want to look it up :)
and then up steeply toward the pass between the Engleberg Rotstock and the Ruchstock.
The flowers are incredible and I decided a while back that if I started photographing them, I would have no SD memory nor battery for anything else.
But still
In fact as is my camera battery is running low and why would I not bring a charger with me to be used in between trips is an embarrassing question. Up from Horbis I see an old, and I mean mid 80's couple coming my way. They must have come up from the Engelberg valley, doing a loop I saw on the map. The trail is rocky and steep and I sit on a flat Boulder and wait for them to pass. She is wearing a skirt, he has a walking stick, one of those that look like a crutch with a grip around the forearm. They have no pack, no bag, no water. It is so hot that I am having a hard time and when they get closer I see they are as well. I have two small bottles of water and offer them a bottle they can take with. They had planned to drink on a few of the lower springs but the stock was already higher than that so they skipped it. They sit down too. The woman is wearing little leather flat shoes and she wants to take one off. I am thinking she must be blistered and offer some leukotape but she says it's just the little rocks that hurt her. Her husband takes off her shoe and removes the half a dozen rocks saying in the sweetest tone " ach Muetterli (oh dear little Mama)…." . The way he rubs her foot is such an act of love I can easily tear up just thinking of it now. She is right that she needs no tape, there are no blisters, no real sore spots. " we'll tell the sons we did it one more time" she tells me. They hike this trail every year to see the wildflowers at their peak. This heat is unusual and they were not quite prepared. I still cannot imagine how they hiked that trail. They have no problem accepting my bottle of water and they are off holding hands for a few feet before they have to let go because the trail gets narrow again.
Pretty soon the cows are gone, goats taking shade below "devil's Boulder" .
I pass an alp protected from falling boulders by fallen boulders.
I pass a SAC hut. I am now in a natural preserve, the first place I see any signs telling you what you can and cannot do. There is a tent and an x over it. I ask the hut warden about the pass and he thinks I should wait until early morning to let the snow firm up . How far to get out of the preserve so I can sleep outside? He says if I just sleep on the ground without pitching anything, and clean up, and don't make a fire I am fine anywhere. I buy a bottle of Rivella ( Swiss soda with milk serum…) and I am off again.
The evening and night I spent in yet another gorgeous spot. No one here but marmots. Snow patches around me. Flowers everywhere. A golden eagle.
Morning I go early as advised and walk through more snow fields. At and near the pass I meet a handful of hikers.
The way down is not hard but now I am thinking about the way back and trains and it seems to take forever. I had lost my "in the moment" attitude and it was hot, again. My arms are getting little blisters. My neck too. I was already really tan and I wore spf 60, so this is odd. I am reacting to the sun and I need out of it.
Back on a train, tired, embarrassingly blistered, but no stink ( thanks to Lavilin :).
Home in time to shower and rest a few minutes before dinner.
I am bound to edited this again and again since I only see my mistakes after I finally create the thread. I appreciate your patience.
Edit 1 :)
Google earth screen shot with my trip drawn with the "doodle app."….so not exact. White blobs are where I spent the night.
