Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Hiking in the Swiss Alps

We had a great day yesterday. While the clouds never actually burned off, we still made a day of it. Jo, JJ, & I hiked up to Murren, then to Im Suppen and then back down. Murren is the next town up from Gimmelwald. We can't really call it a hike to Murren, because it's actually a paved road, but it is UP.
A quick comment about the road. Gimmelwald is relatively car-free. There are some tractors and small 4x4s, or farm trucks that pass by. Even this really cool old Mercedes Military truck I'm trying to get a photo of. One of the other guests works for Mercedes and is blown away by this thing as well. Anyway, the road that runs from the cable car up is a narrow single lane. While we don't see vehicles often, they do zip along. I need to ask Tim about the "rules of the road" for when there is opposing traffic. It has to happen at some point. There are not a lot of places to pull over or into along this road, so one vehicle must have to back up. I just wonder how they decide.
Ok, back to the walk/hike. It takes about 35 minutes to get to Murren. Since we were still in a lot of cloud cover, we couldn't see the peaks and were walking in pea soup like fog. But it was still quiet neat. One thing that is really investing here is that no matter where you are, you can hear the sounds from waterfalls. The run-off is unreal and the water falls on the other side of the valley are huge. I've included a video so you can get a little bit of what I'm saying. The sound you hear is not static, it the sound from the waterfall in the center of the frame when the video starts, which is on the other side of the valley. It's not a great quality video, but I think you'll get the idea.

YouTube Video


Once we got to Murren, we made our way through town to an actual hiking trail and started up some more. Yes, thin air, lots of climbing, and not riding/hiking this summer made for some tired lungs. However, the hike was well worth it.








About half-way up, a we crossed paths with a women. She told us about a little zip-line in the trees up the trail. We had a fun time playing on that. Here are a couple actions photos of Jo & JJ on the swing.
We hiked along through mountain meadows and heard the cow bells in the distance, but the fog really prevented us from seeing much beyond a few hundred yards.

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