06.05.19
This weekend we took the train just a short distance to Walenstadt where we planned on taking the Wanderweg up alongside the Chaserrugg. There was a window of sunshine opening up and we'd scoured the shore for a decent campground to post up where we could leave some of our belongings and find some sort of circuit that would return us back to the shores of Walensee. But of course, this is Switzerland. If there's sunshine, the Swiss are enjoying it. If it's a holiday weekend, the campgrounds are full of families, barbecues, and boom boxes. It almost felt like home, only this campground was noticeably crammed. Silent reflecting by the water wasn't going to happen, but we did our best, walking away toward a little pier and dragging the tent away from the teenage beer-pong championship. I guess this is what they call 'glamping', where you set up around a bunch of other people with outlets, charging stations, running water, and designated cooking stations. Plenty of the resorts along the PCT were like this. You've got a sweet piece of property by a body of water so you've got to cater to the crowds. We cooked in our little propane stoves and munched on trail bars and looked at the Suissemobil for trail options. Plenty of red-n-whites alongside the mountain. We could climb and get up to the last high farmlands before the big stone walls and pitch a tent there. So we fell asleep to the fading boom-ts-boom-ts and woke in time to meet Hanne's friend Kirsten back at the train station and started walking. Up. Up. Up.
There's one level higher that the red and whites. The blue and whites. These blazes denote technical climbing, probably involving a few ropes at minimum. Kirsten tells me this is the only country with an official trail system like this. The Wanderweg, "Hiking Trail." It would make sense. There'd be no post-cards of all this Alpine beauty if you couldn't get into it at the drop of a hat. Anytime we go to the closer bergs it's alive with mountain bikes, hikers, and then up above...making slow circles in the air are the para-gliders and hang-gliders. This is The Sport. The Thing. You need a license of course, like everything in Switzerland. You need lessons to get the license and then you need a para-sail. There's the way things are when you look deeply into Swiss culture. Things ingrained out of necessity and pragmatism. A country this size, beset by four other countries, has to have its identity intact to function properly. It needs rules that work, even if they're a pain in the ass. That being said it's incredibly international and innovative in the technological and financial sectors. Google, Facebook, Bayer, etc. Well, they all set up here because it's a business-friendly environment but the Switzerland I love is far, far away from the Maseratis and economic forums. I'm here for the Alps.
I clip in the camera on a series of carabiners, stuff the tripod to the side and lug it up along with everything else. If there's an absolute must moment then everyone has to stop for me to quickly set up and get the shot but the tripod is a new addition, mostly for night shots. Landscape photography is tough enough because you've got to first get to the location. Then you've got to sit there waiting for the right lighting. When you come home and unload a terabyte of RAW images into your hard drive and start editing, everything looks different. Then it's the mind-game of stepping back and trying not to 'over-edit' to make everything look the way it did when you saw it first. These Adobe products make it challenging. Presets, auto this and auto that. I know I've got a good shot when all I have to do is bump the exposure a few clicks and clear the RAW blur a little bit. At this point I'm wondering if I should even be shooting in RAW for landscape photography. What's the point honestly? If I were creating posters, then yes absolutely. Hmmm.
Over the trails we go until we realize we've gone a bit off course and I head down a short ravine to collect some super glacial water. "It tastes like there's more oxygen in it somehow." We find our way back to the Wanderweg after using a one-way paved road that hangs onto the side of the mountain. No way to see a good 80% of the interconnected trails and roads from below. They're all hidden and covered by foliage or the angles alone are to steep to perceive. Make no mistake though: At the summit of most accessible hills in Switzerland there's a traditional cafe run by a sweet family with a couple friendly dogs. So, we find ours and have a couple cappuccinos and ciders and pet the dog and watch the hang-gliders and look lazily out into the haze of the holiday weekend over Walenstadt far below.
We're deciding on where to go from here. Basically left or right. Chaserrugg or back north toward Amden which was one of the first places we hiked when I got here three months ago. My God.
I remembered being in awe of the landscape, thinking I'd never run out of trail and photo ops. I still feel this way whenever we go out, but I'm slowly acclimating. I take German classes now at the library down the street where some days I'm the only one without a burqa. We all have to help each other learn though. My teacher is a Serbian immigrant who learned German the same way. One step at a time. I'm almost at the point where I can participate in 1/50th of a conversation when I pick out the right subject matter. I can get along just fine in the market most of the time. These things take time. Do I miss the 'space' of North America. Yes. Quite a bit. I miss the PCT all the time still. I think about it...wonder who's gotten through the snow this year. Wonder if the CDT is still in the works. Being in any city is still claustrophobic and we take every opportunity we can to walk in the woods. Many days I just have to walk. I put on my shoes and head out the front door and just start walking. For an hour. Sometimes it turns into 3 hours. Since the trail I've broken down numerous times just trying to process 2018. Wanting to return to that feeling.
On Tuesday it will be one year since my mother passed away. One year. It angers me. It defeats me. It demands sensitivity and introspection. You walk around in a world that hasn't exactly had the same year as you. People offer condolences and forget a week later, whereas I carry it in a different way. That's just the way it is. The other day I discovered her Pinterest account through an old email. I spent hours looking at all her little boards and interests. Sides of her I never knew. Folk singers, pictures of stones and pottery. VW conversion vans and even some pictures of the Alps. There were things that she'd pinned even as she was going through treatment, as if she knew that I'd come across the board sooner or later. Little messages. Quotes. She knew something. It was like little notes to the future. I was mesmerized. There's a part of her that has always been part of me. Not in the tangiable day-to-day way...more in the content of our internal dreams and inspirations. We both craved communion. Trying to make sense of the past, of my childhood, of everything...is an uphill battle some days. There's things I couldn't begin to describe to the world at large. Experiences, events, etc. I keep it simple. I take pictures. I put the pieces together as best as I can. Time itself has become something of a puzzle, revealing things I never considered before. This has been the year for it. So, now it's been one year since Burney Guest Ranch. Our first 30-miler. Detailed at length in the fading journals I still keep, all transcribed now. (Coming in close to 9pm, thinking the place was shut down, wandering about until a single light came on in the main house and a woman with a gentle voice came out and lit our spirits with food and conversation until we crashed in the front yard to the sound of crickets.)
It's impossible to just 'get over' a thru-hike. It doesn't actually happen. We'd spoken to numerous people who'd done it before. "You're never really the same." Once you do something like that, it's just in your blood. Everything changes. Your outlook. Your trajectory; but it's no cure-all. That course is wrought with just as many unique challenges. I'd say to myself if I could: Commit to this trail only if you can commit to the aftermath as well. Of course, there's no way to comprehend what that will be. The 'aftermath' is that I'm in Switzerland with the girl I love. The challenge is that we find ourselves in this unique position and work daily to understand the next part of the journey. We have that VW now. We scour threads and listings. I make new contacts and inquire about opportunities in the midst of near-constant movement; slowly building yet another vehicle worthy of what lies in front of us.
On the Wanderweg we come to an epic view with a humongous cross dominating a bluff overlooking everything. From Amden to Walenstadt and far south into the valley where farmland sits in little green and yellow patchwork between the mountains. There's still snow everywhere. An extremely late spring. Avalanche fields are melting and this means rocks are falling. Big ones. Entire cliff-faces are peeling off and bounding down, smashing into more rocks and shooting them high above us before they come pelting down on the snow at the base of the mountains. We're far enough away that none of them have the inertia to reach us, but we can see and hear everything. Great thunderous cacophonies. The shattering crunch of impact. The low rumbling echos.
We say goodbye to Kirsten here. She's got to get back to Zurich tonight so she takes a steep side-trail down back toward Walenstadt and we sit on a big wooden bench overlooking everything. A few other hikers come and go. We inquire about the snow fields ahead of us; if they're passable or not. Should be no problem. We decide to wait for everyone to clear out before pitching the tent right on the side of the bluff. I set up the tripod and wait. And wait. Little lights, one by one. The mountains are clear in the distance. There's a good chill in the air. I scan the horizon. I try different shots. By the time it's dark I've got dozens. When the lights come on I start doing some long-shutters. Incredible. I get transfixed on the changing light. The way the hues change so imperceptibly slow. The way the snow lights up on top of the Alps in the distance. Purple. Pink. Deep saturated blues and greens everywhere. It's a different world up here. This, for me, is the right distance from everything. In it, but not of it.
I remembered looking down at Los Angeles from different points in Angeles National Forest last year...millions of tiny silent dots and imperceptibly small right angles that constituted a city that dominated our media and ideas about the modern world...I looked down on it from 50 miles away, high in the mountains and thought the same thing: "This is the right distance to experience LA from."
We woke up and ambled about with the usual routine: Collect water for coffee. Start propane stoves. (Pohpf!) Brush teeth. Collect gear, stuff into sacks, eat some fruit and trail bars. Put one or two more in the pockets. Clip it up. Strap it down. Head out.
The snow fields turned into longer stretches of blinding trail-less white filled with debris but it wasn't too crazy. Occasionally we heard rocks tumbling down toward us but still at a reasonable distance. It was clear that we were early enough that the trail hadn't been maintained, partially because it remained covered in late snow. The avalanches tore out anything and everything in their path. Mangled trees snapped like toothpicks and carried 1/2 kilometer before wedging somewhere in the side of a creek-bed. As the snow began to melt and flow down into Walensee below, it carved massive tunnels beneath the avalanches, some 2 meters high that you cold stand in front of, feeling the rush of freezing cold air exiting with the water as it crossed the path. Some farmers had to get from one field to another so they used their own tractors each year to carve out the roads once covered by avalanches. This seems like a yearly occurrence and life in the high Alps has been been dealing and adapting for centuries.
A couple times we saw rocks get a little too close for comfort, one time a great cubed piece came bouncing down down down and kept bouncing until it was only a few meters from the trail in some grass. It gave us pause, but we figured sound traveled faster than the rocks themselves. Whenever there was a big thunder from above we looked up and gauged our distance. On a couple avalanche fields we heard rocks coming down just moments before we got to them so we took it pretty cautiously. One of us hauled across as fast as possible and waited on the other side while the other looked and listened. We made quick plans as far as where to bail if rocks came our way. We didn't want a rock taking out both of us haplessly trudging over the snow and we weren't strangers to the reality of how many people are taken out each year by them. In fact, when we got back to Zurich and sat at a friend's the next day, Kirsten joined us again and told us that an elderly fellow had actually been killed the same day in the same area were in. When you hear things like that you always pause... You want to say a quick prayer for him and his family. What else can you do? A hiker just enjoying the Wanderweg like everyone else. In hindsight, we could have forgone the route we took and enjoyed a day by the lake, but this is the condition many hikers find themselves in.
Wherever you hike, you're never going to be fully appraised of the exact conditions and potential situations of the trail. Once you hike in, you've got to hike out. So, we did it as carefully as we could, climbing over smashed trunks and mudslides, eventually resisting gravity for the last 2 kilometers on a vertical descent that had my legs in pain 4 days after the trail. I never had pain like that on the PCT! The great thing is that my knees finally work again and didn't present any problem whatsoever.
The eventual payoff was the little restaurant directly at the bottom, next to the ferry that would take us over to Quarten. A glass of rotwein. Cheezy spaetzle. 10 minutes on the boat. Flopping down on the train again. Winding back up to Main Station. The tram back home. Unpacking. Making sure to drink more water before bed. Trying to remember what goes where. Lying down. "I love you."
Goodnight.
There's one level higher that the red and whites. The blue and whites. These blazes denote technical climbing, probably involving a few ropes at minimum. Kirsten tells me this is the only country with an official trail system like this. The Wanderweg, "Hiking Trail." It would make sense. There'd be no post-cards of all this Alpine beauty if you couldn't get into it at the drop of a hat. Anytime we go to the closer bergs it's alive with mountain bikes, hikers, and then up above...making slow circles in the air are the para-gliders and hang-gliders. This is The Sport. The Thing. You need a license of course, like everything in Switzerland. You need lessons to get the license and then you need a para-sail. There's the way things are when you look deeply into Swiss culture. Things ingrained out of necessity and pragmatism. A country this size, beset by four other countries, has to have its identity intact to function properly. It needs rules that work, even if they're a pain in the ass. That being said it's incredibly international and innovative in the technological and financial sectors. Google, Facebook, Bayer, etc. Well, they all set up here because it's a business-friendly environment but the Switzerland I love is far, far away from the Maseratis and economic forums. I'm here for the Alps.
I clip in the camera on a series of carabiners, stuff the tripod to the side and lug it up along with everything else. If there's an absolute must moment then everyone has to stop for me to quickly set up and get the shot but the tripod is a new addition, mostly for night shots. Landscape photography is tough enough because you've got to first get to the location. Then you've got to sit there waiting for the right lighting. When you come home and unload a terabyte of RAW images into your hard drive and start editing, everything looks different. Then it's the mind-game of stepping back and trying not to 'over-edit' to make everything look the way it did when you saw it first. These Adobe products make it challenging. Presets, auto this and auto that. I know I've got a good shot when all I have to do is bump the exposure a few clicks and clear the RAW blur a little bit. At this point I'm wondering if I should even be shooting in RAW for landscape photography. What's the point honestly? If I were creating posters, then yes absolutely. Hmmm.
Over the trails we go until we realize we've gone a bit off course and I head down a short ravine to collect some super glacial water. "It tastes like there's more oxygen in it somehow." We find our way back to the Wanderweg after using a one-way paved road that hangs onto the side of the mountain. No way to see a good 80% of the interconnected trails and roads from below. They're all hidden and covered by foliage or the angles alone are to steep to perceive. Make no mistake though: At the summit of most accessible hills in Switzerland there's a traditional cafe run by a sweet family with a couple friendly dogs. So, we find ours and have a couple cappuccinos and ciders and pet the dog and watch the hang-gliders and look lazily out into the haze of the holiday weekend over Walenstadt far below.
We're deciding on where to go from here. Basically left or right. Chaserrugg or back north toward Amden which was one of the first places we hiked when I got here three months ago. My God.
I remembered being in awe of the landscape, thinking I'd never run out of trail and photo ops. I still feel this way whenever we go out, but I'm slowly acclimating. I take German classes now at the library down the street where some days I'm the only one without a burqa. We all have to help each other learn though. My teacher is a Serbian immigrant who learned German the same way. One step at a time. I'm almost at the point where I can participate in 1/50th of a conversation when I pick out the right subject matter. I can get along just fine in the market most of the time. These things take time. Do I miss the 'space' of North America. Yes. Quite a bit. I miss the PCT all the time still. I think about it...wonder who's gotten through the snow this year. Wonder if the CDT is still in the works. Being in any city is still claustrophobic and we take every opportunity we can to walk in the woods. Many days I just have to walk. I put on my shoes and head out the front door and just start walking. For an hour. Sometimes it turns into 3 hours. Since the trail I've broken down numerous times just trying to process 2018. Wanting to return to that feeling.
On Tuesday it will be one year since my mother passed away. One year. It angers me. It defeats me. It demands sensitivity and introspection. You walk around in a world that hasn't exactly had the same year as you. People offer condolences and forget a week later, whereas I carry it in a different way. That's just the way it is. The other day I discovered her Pinterest account through an old email. I spent hours looking at all her little boards and interests. Sides of her I never knew. Folk singers, pictures of stones and pottery. VW conversion vans and even some pictures of the Alps. There were things that she'd pinned even as she was going through treatment, as if she knew that I'd come across the board sooner or later. Little messages. Quotes. She knew something. It was like little notes to the future. I was mesmerized. There's a part of her that has always been part of me. Not in the tangiable day-to-day way...more in the content of our internal dreams and inspirations. We both craved communion. Trying to make sense of the past, of my childhood, of everything...is an uphill battle some days. There's things I couldn't begin to describe to the world at large. Experiences, events, etc. I keep it simple. I take pictures. I put the pieces together as best as I can. Time itself has become something of a puzzle, revealing things I never considered before. This has been the year for it. So, now it's been one year since Burney Guest Ranch. Our first 30-miler. Detailed at length in the fading journals I still keep, all transcribed now. (Coming in close to 9pm, thinking the place was shut down, wandering about until a single light came on in the main house and a woman with a gentle voice came out and lit our spirits with food and conversation until we crashed in the front yard to the sound of crickets.)
It's impossible to just 'get over' a thru-hike. It doesn't actually happen. We'd spoken to numerous people who'd done it before. "You're never really the same." Once you do something like that, it's just in your blood. Everything changes. Your outlook. Your trajectory; but it's no cure-all. That course is wrought with just as many unique challenges. I'd say to myself if I could: Commit to this trail only if you can commit to the aftermath as well. Of course, there's no way to comprehend what that will be. The 'aftermath' is that I'm in Switzerland with the girl I love. The challenge is that we find ourselves in this unique position and work daily to understand the next part of the journey. We have that VW now. We scour threads and listings. I make new contacts and inquire about opportunities in the midst of near-constant movement; slowly building yet another vehicle worthy of what lies in front of us.
On the Wanderweg we come to an epic view with a humongous cross dominating a bluff overlooking everything. From Amden to Walenstadt and far south into the valley where farmland sits in little green and yellow patchwork between the mountains. There's still snow everywhere. An extremely late spring. Avalanche fields are melting and this means rocks are falling. Big ones. Entire cliff-faces are peeling off and bounding down, smashing into more rocks and shooting them high above us before they come pelting down on the snow at the base of the mountains. We're far enough away that none of them have the inertia to reach us, but we can see and hear everything. Great thunderous cacophonies. The shattering crunch of impact. The low rumbling echos.
We say goodbye to Kirsten here. She's got to get back to Zurich tonight so she takes a steep side-trail down back toward Walenstadt and we sit on a big wooden bench overlooking everything. A few other hikers come and go. We inquire about the snow fields ahead of us; if they're passable or not. Should be no problem. We decide to wait for everyone to clear out before pitching the tent right on the side of the bluff. I set up the tripod and wait. And wait. Little lights, one by one. The mountains are clear in the distance. There's a good chill in the air. I scan the horizon. I try different shots. By the time it's dark I've got dozens. When the lights come on I start doing some long-shutters. Incredible. I get transfixed on the changing light. The way the hues change so imperceptibly slow. The way the snow lights up on top of the Alps in the distance. Purple. Pink. Deep saturated blues and greens everywhere. It's a different world up here. This, for me, is the right distance from everything. In it, but not of it.
I remembered looking down at Los Angeles from different points in Angeles National Forest last year...millions of tiny silent dots and imperceptibly small right angles that constituted a city that dominated our media and ideas about the modern world...I looked down on it from 50 miles away, high in the mountains and thought the same thing: "This is the right distance to experience LA from."
We woke up and ambled about with the usual routine: Collect water for coffee. Start propane stoves. (Pohpf!) Brush teeth. Collect gear, stuff into sacks, eat some fruit and trail bars. Put one or two more in the pockets. Clip it up. Strap it down. Head out.
The snow fields turned into longer stretches of blinding trail-less white filled with debris but it wasn't too crazy. Occasionally we heard rocks tumbling down toward us but still at a reasonable distance. It was clear that we were early enough that the trail hadn't been maintained, partially because it remained covered in late snow. The avalanches tore out anything and everything in their path. Mangled trees snapped like toothpicks and carried 1/2 kilometer before wedging somewhere in the side of a creek-bed. As the snow began to melt and flow down into Walensee below, it carved massive tunnels beneath the avalanches, some 2 meters high that you cold stand in front of, feeling the rush of freezing cold air exiting with the water as it crossed the path. Some farmers had to get from one field to another so they used their own tractors each year to carve out the roads once covered by avalanches. This seems like a yearly occurrence and life in the high Alps has been been dealing and adapting for centuries.
A couple times we saw rocks get a little too close for comfort, one time a great cubed piece came bouncing down down down and kept bouncing until it was only a few meters from the trail in some grass. It gave us pause, but we figured sound traveled faster than the rocks themselves. Whenever there was a big thunder from above we looked up and gauged our distance. On a couple avalanche fields we heard rocks coming down just moments before we got to them so we took it pretty cautiously. One of us hauled across as fast as possible and waited on the other side while the other looked and listened. We made quick plans as far as where to bail if rocks came our way. We didn't want a rock taking out both of us haplessly trudging over the snow and we weren't strangers to the reality of how many people are taken out each year by them. In fact, when we got back to Zurich and sat at a friend's the next day, Kirsten joined us again and told us that an elderly fellow had actually been killed the same day in the same area were in. When you hear things like that you always pause... You want to say a quick prayer for him and his family. What else can you do? A hiker just enjoying the Wanderweg like everyone else. In hindsight, we could have forgone the route we took and enjoyed a day by the lake, but this is the condition many hikers find themselves in.
Wherever you hike, you're never going to be fully appraised of the exact conditions and potential situations of the trail. Once you hike in, you've got to hike out. So, we did it as carefully as we could, climbing over smashed trunks and mudslides, eventually resisting gravity for the last 2 kilometers on a vertical descent that had my legs in pain 4 days after the trail. I never had pain like that on the PCT! The great thing is that my knees finally work again and didn't present any problem whatsoever.
The eventual payoff was the little restaurant directly at the bottom, next to the ferry that would take us over to Quarten. A glass of rotwein. Cheezy spaetzle. 10 minutes on the boat. Flopping down on the train again. Winding back up to Main Station. The tram back home. Unpacking. Making sure to drink more water before bed. Trying to remember what goes where. Lying down. "I love you."
Goodnight.
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