back to the alps

Sun sparkles over rocks,
Parts mists, lights mountains, and shines
On all those who smile.

I got another chance to see the Alps, and this time was absurdly fantastic. The comment I put on my Facebook album was that "this place was stupid gorgeous. I'm photo-retarded and wound up with some great shots."

I got to see Alex's "office," and by that I mean the obscenely gorgeous (and freezing) river he has to climb into every day. The water is a really fascinating blue; he told me that it's because it's running over limestone and picking up some of the minerals.

The place that we stayed the first night was a little hütte in the mountains that was owned jointly by a guy named Charly and a guy from Nepal. Charly rides his motorcycle into the mountains along a crazy trail every day to get there. There's a helicopter place out back so that they can airlift the beer in. At night, Charly plays the hammer dulcimer, Simon strums the guitar, and the guy from Nepal sings in languages I can't even recognize. The morning awakening (at a confused-blink-inducing 5:50am) is the same.

Some snow was still hanging on in the shadows of the mountains. I took some time to play in it.

We wandered over everywhere, spent some time stargazing (the Perseids are this week, for those of you keeping score at home), and explored a cave that Alex's supervisor had asked him to check out. The thing was not only at the top of a talus cone, there was about 3 metres of free-climb to be done to get up to it. And do you know what was at the top? Sheep poop. Damn sheep.

We ran into a friendly bunch of mountain sheep, actually, the black one among which was super excited to see us for some reason inapparent.

More wandering brought us to another hütte, where we stopped for a beer (airlifted beer... mmmm...). The rest of the day took us through the klam (gorge), where sudden rain fulfilled the double purposes of chasing away other tourists and making the place feel like a lost world. The klam is basically a canyon carved out by the Partnach (the river Alex works in); it has caves bored through the side for people to walk through, and they're lit with lights too tiny to push back the darkness of a stormy German sky entirely. It was spooky and beautiful.

I met Alex's roommates/field partners: Martin, a PhD student, and Christopher, the son of the professor he's working with. The four of us took a gondola up a mountain the next morning to start another hike.

Atop this mountain, it's apparently great sport to skydive. There were about half a dozen people packing parachutes on the grass, and there were platforms hanging into space designed for them to jump from. I wish I could've tried.

So we hiked down and down and down... pausing, since I was in the company of geologists, to survey a cave or two along the way. The route we took is evidently rather frequented: there were stairs in tough spots down it. We came to another hütte along the way, and Martin and Christopher had sensible lunches while Alex and I had less-than-sensible maßes (litres of beer). It made the rest of the hike down the mountain more fun.

We emerged through another klam, which makes for a pretty excellent story since it was the way out of hell. The valley we'd been in for a while was called Hell's something-or-other (Alex? what was it?). Anyway, this one was even more spectacular than the other one.

Following all that, we went back home for a much-needed shower. Then out to dinner with Mr. Steven Soneff, who was in the area on "business" (and by that I mean he was visiting family in Zürich and wound up committing CLs at the Google office there for part of a day).

I miss the mountains. I'll probably have to find myself there once again in the not-too-distant future. Maybe I'll be a geologist, after all. ;)

p.s. Picasa has been updated! All my photos are there now. :)

yodele-oooo-hooooooooo!

I feel like Heidi,
Cloud shadows pass over cows,
Wildflowers, and peace.

The Alps! I don't know how much I'll achieve by trying to describe this weekends experiences in Switzerland and France, but we'll give it the old college try.

Friday began our travels: Mathieu and I were thwarted in our attempts to procure hiking shoes for him (a failure which would come back to haunt, um, him), so we headed to the Hauptbanhof in Darmstadt and hopped on a train bound for Basel, Switzerland. I had been intrigued by the prospect of standing in three countries at the same time, but, unfortunately, the border is in the middle of the intersection of two rivers. :( It didn't matter so much that, day, though, since it was about 23:00 when we got there, and nothing was visible. We found a hostel (thanks to the help of a random guy from Peru) and spent some time determining our awesome for the next day.

Exploring Basel was pretty cool; it's been the haunt of lots of famous people over the years. There's an Euler bar and hotel there, but it was sadly way out of my and Mathieu's price range. Holy hell was Switzerland expensive! But that's a different story. Anyway, the "sights" of Basel included a skeleton cathedral, a fountain with crazy robots in it, a marketplace, and a really sweet town hall.

That, of course, wasn't the highlight of the day. We took a series of confusing trains and buses to Langenbruck Post, where we again had some confusion relating to where to go. We asked a local woman, and her response was that she didn't know where the beginning of the trail was, but to get to where the end was, just "turn right, turn left, go over the mountain, and you're there."

And it was thus. We found the trailhead. The first hour was standard hiking, which was a huge disappointment. We munched bread and cheese (Swiss cheese, naturally) and a bit of chocolate (also Swiss... mmm...) and were bored by trees. There were no spectacular views, or even views at all, really. Finally, at some point we emerged onto the mountaintop, and it felt suddenly like the Alps.

Our first view was of a field of wildflowers containing nothing but a house. Beyond it were fields of grass rippling in the wind, a couple houses, and a windmill that was obviously powering them. There were cows roaming in some fields, and mountains rolling away as far as we could see. I was happy that I'd braided my hair into pigtails; as I mentioned, everything you may have read in Heidi is true.

Further wanderings took us over ridges and through cow fields, and eventually we found ourselves at a gorgeous panorama of tiny villages and more (vomitously picturesque) rolling green hills. I yodeled.

There was a cow that I tried to pet, but it licked my hand, and I laughed. It scampered away, wide-eyed and afraid. A horse later on gratefully took an apple and a pat on the nose from me. Breathing the absurdly fresh air was almost as refreshing as drinking water (which was fortunate because we were sadly undersupplied in that department).

Communication on the hike was hard: we only saw a couple people, but they didn't speak English or French, and their German was as broken as our own. Through the miracles of maps and pointing, we managed to get to Geneva the second night, where we spent some memorable time taking turns sleeping in front of a clothing store (by the time we arrived, it would have been impossible to find a hostel for the night). I learned how to greet people by kissing cheeks thanks to a random drunk Swiss fellow.

We saw CERN (where the LHC is), the original UN building, a park full of giant chess boards (knights above your knees!), a cathedral where John Calvin preached, the largest fountain in Europe, their semi-famous floral clock, and a restaurant that served delicious Swiss fondue. One neat thing about Geneva is that there are fountains everywhere spouting potable water. Delicious!

The final day saw us waking up too early, eating a delicious breakfast at our hostel, and training off to Lausanne to see Castle Chillon. It's on an island in the middle of a lake in the mountains, and it's ancient and gorgeous. I probably want a castle when I grow up. :D