we had to get up super early saturday morning to make the train, but it was absolutely worth it to get out and up in the mountains for (probably) the last sunny weekend of the summer. reto, mike, simone, farnoush, vadim, christina and myself managed to get up in time, but we missed isa, who missed her train in luzern...
the train trip to the south-west of chur was fun enough in itself, especially the exciting swiss solution for building train tracks up very steep slopes. the train just did loops inside the mountain, and popped out at the same place, just 50m vertical up! how exciting!
we had to have a couple of cups of coffee once we'd arrived at the train station to begin the walk, but finally got ourselves away and wandering up the gorgeous valley up towards our hut - home for the night. perfect blue skies with dashes of clouds, sunny but not too hot, the occasional marmot on the lookout, cows wandering down from the pastures for the winter, and mountains looming over us all around made for a lovely stroll. we made it to the hut rather early, and so spent the afternoon exploring the valley and mini-glaciers up above the hut. evening was gorgeous as well, with delicious homemade dinners, beer on tap (and cheaper than the uni bar at eth hönggerberg...), sooo many stars, and lightening in the far distance.
sunday dawned crisp and just as clear, so we were off to our pass. reto scooted up the glacier, while the rest of us cramponless went the slightly longer way round. but that turned out to be even more exciting, since we ran into a herd of very impressive steinbock/zlatarog/mountain goats. the way they trotted along unbelievably exposed and steep slopes was, um, unbelievable. we made do with strolling down towards pleasent green pastures full of friendly cows and back to civilisation. luckily we had to wait 70 minutes for our bus, so we had plenty of time to start and finish the bottle of whiskey reto had been carrying for us the whole trip.
there is a collage of pics
here.
