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Friday July 20th, 2007
The rest day in Elm was very pleasant indeed. The valley is superb: wide and green and with dramatic views up to the almost 3000m peaks on all sides. Particularly interesting to me was that you can really see the geology for once, exemplified best by the Martinsloch, a huge (at least 30m by 30m) hole all the way through a ridge high above the valley. The hole formed because softer rock underlying the tougher rock of the top of the ridge has worn away, and in fact you can see the hard/soft dividing line all the way up and down the valley. An interesting fact: the sun shines through the hole onto the church of the village exactly twice a year: at the beginning of Spring and the beginning of Autumn.
The village itself is absolutely charming: they have done a superb job of preserving beautiful old buildings while integrating some modern structures and facilities. And although the village caters very nicely to tourists, it still has a life apart from tourism, with many school-age children and farming and local businesses. The valley is a dead-end as far as roads are concerned and so there is very little traffic; yet even so a bypass for the main road has been built, so there are next to no cars and trucks in the center of the village itself. I liked it a great deal.
And then our Hotel, the Elmer, was also excellent: with modern reasonably sized rooms (although the bathtub in his room was a little small for Russell -- pictures forthcoming!), a good restaurant, and a very nice terrace out back looking over a green meadow, frequented by cats and rabbits, to the Martinsloch. It also had a nicely integrated external glass elevator, which Russell and I used religiously in order to avoid the two flights of stairs :-).
The hotel owner was exceedingly welcoming and helpful, with many suggestions of things to do in the area and even offering us (multiple times) the use of her car if we wanted to do anything too far away to walk. Her disappointed incomprehension at our apparent desire to spend the whole day sitting around writing postcards and playing games, despite the excellent weather, was so evident that I had to reassure her that although we might seem slothful to her it was only because we were so active on the days we hiked!
And so once again it was with some regret that we walked out of the hotel at 7:15 on Friday morning to hike the next stage over the Richetli Pass to the village of Linthal. The fine weather eased our way, however, and we were soon walking up valley quite briskly, in order to make it more difficult for the annoying small horseflies to settle upon our bare legs and arms. "We" in this case were Thomas and I, Sally and Russell being immune because they typically hike in long sleeved shirt and pants.
It was a beautiful walk and the path seemed to have been thoughtfully laid out so as to make it as easy as possible to climb the 1450m to the pass. After about 3h we came to a mountain restaurant where we had some excellent home-made cake, then climbed up past herds of cows (one of which developed a worrying interest in me, following and almost chasing me along the path, perhaps because I had a red fleece fixed to the back of my pack, thought Russell, or maybe because I looked like a cowherd, thought Thomas) to the pass
