-
Lost in a fog
When we had a chance to unwind after the Italy tour, we caught up with the folks at home, uploaded some pictures, then got real pumped for our second free travel weekend. We decided to spend it driving through the Swiss Alps to Interlaken, Bern, Lucerne, and Sumvigt. Kyle, John, Ben, and Angie had reservations to bungy jump off the Goldeneye dam on Sunday, so I volunteered to be the camera guy to #1: avoid doing it myself, and #2: save ‘em some money on their memories. Here’s the scoop on Interlaken…
The rumors are true, it’s beautiful. We went on a gloomy weekend, and it STILL blew my mind. It sits in the valley under enormous mountain cliffs that set back to alpine towns and the highest peaks I’ve ever seen in person, by far. I’m relatively fresh on the globetrotting scene, so that might not be saying much, but I’ll try and let the pictures do the talking.
We traveled by car, and the clouds were teasing us the closer we got to our hostel. I was at the wheel, so I got a front row seat to watch the waterfalls and sneaky light beams poking through the clouds; meanwhile Kyle and John were hangin out the window with their cameras, tearing up from the windy sub 45 degree cold, trying to capture the beauty. It was incredible.
Our first hike was the Tremmelbach falls. There were around 10-15 different falls running through the mountain, weaving in and out of pools under caves and into a valley stream. I’d never seen anything like it, so i’d say it was worth the ten franki/half hour.
When we came down the sun said hello, and we were all about the click-clicks. Kyle told us we would be remiss if we didn’t check out what he heard was the most gorgeous town on earth, about 2 minutes from us. Can’t say no to that, right? We hopped in the car, got a two way gondola ticket for Gimmelwald and took off for the cliff-top. All packed up and looking up past the station, I figured I was in for one of the most memorable hikes in my life, but not for the same reasons in the end that it actually was.
We blazed the high valley trail past sunny and non-threatening Gimmelwald, which was loaded with noisy cow and goat bells. One moo-ed at me as I passed, looking real pissed, and so the omens began. The further away from there we ventured, the cloudier it became, so that wasn’t nice. There were points where we could see a foggy silhouette of the mountain peaks ahead, but within a few minutes they’d fade, and the top three quarters would be covered in clouds. It wasn’t disappointing though, when we got here…
I couldn’t help the urge to run, I was so happy. It felt like recess in first grade all over again, but the valley was the playground. To give you a sense of the scale, here’s the view looking back from about 100 yards short of those waterfalls in the distance. Kyle and Ben are in this picture, and if you can find them, you’re an eagle.
John and I couldn’t hear them when they were waving and yelling for us to come back, but when we finally figured it out, they had already headed back for the trail. Until this trip I had never been bounding down or towards anything, but I learned its significance the hard way when I was trying to catch up with them… I was bounding down the rocks so damn hard my backpack unzipped and my camera flew out!
Scary times on foggy mountain. I took an “is it broken?” pic after I heard the thump, and John’s concerned look says everything about the suspense. It turned out ok, but now I feel like a father who had too much fun tossing his child in the air (WEEEEE…oh god…). I’m just mad protective of it now. When we caught ‘em we decided we weren’t done; we wanted to get above the clouds to see the snow-caps.
My legs were about ready to detach at the knees, so I was reaaaal pumped for the next upward 200m. Ben and I recalled motivations from high school wrestling practice to go hard or go home, so when we look down at our prosthetics around age 55, we’ll have this trip to thank.
We made it into the clouds, and found a closed-down station that looked like an out of season ski-lodge. At this point you could see moisture beads building up on everybody’s face in the fog, and it was getting pretty cold. It was time to heat things up so we did some roof runnin and got back on track. Or so we thought.
It wasn’t long before we were backtracking through a thick fogfest, so we decided to cut our losses and head down the mountain to meet Angie at the hostel.
We met a fellow Hokie and a few recent JMU grads there, coincidentally, and got an earful about our embarrassment at Lane Stadium earlier this year. This was coming from a group that collaborated with John and Kyle to ICE me upon my return from the ATM, so that sucked. In the end though, it was a good time and I couldn’t wait for day two.
