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Sunday July 29th, 2007
We walked out of our hotel at 8:15 under partially cloudy skies. The day promised to be fairly cool, which suited us well, since although the hike up and over the Grosse Scheidegg pass would not be a difficult one, it would be long.
Because of this Beatrice, mindful of her leg cramps after the last hike, had decided to take the Postbus up to the Schwarzwaldalp, thereby saving herself some 800m of climbing and shortening the day by 3+ hours. But Bea cannot endure inactivity for long when in the mountains, so it was not to be. She left the bus at Rosenlaui for a short walk up the side valley to see the glacier, and some 2 hours and several hundred meters of ascent and descent later got back on the bus.
As a result at the end of the day she had tears of pain in her eyes once more. However, on balance it was probably a reasonable bargain because she said that the Rosenlaui valley was so beautiful that she was crying with joy (and by the following morning she was fine once more). Clearly, therefore, like Meiringen (and Elm, and Vaduz...), this is another place that I will have to come back to.
We spent a half an hour at the pass watching a "Schwingen" competition at a little folksfest. Schwingen is sort of like a stunted version of sumo, or possibly like cows (not bulls :-) vieing for dominance. The two participants in each bout spend most of their time bent double, cheek to cheek, holding onto one anothers' pants, punctuated by short bursts of frenetic movement and grunting, and culminating in one or the other being thrown to the ground and pinned. Not the most elegant of sports, but somehow appropriate in the Alpine context!
The views were (as usual) spectacular: with massive glaciers and even more massive mountains. The high points, as we were coming down, were our first views of the Eiger, and the Upper Grindelwald Glacier cascading down its narrow valley to end about 1350m, making it one of the lowest glaciers, if not the lowest, in Switzerland.
We reached Grindelwald around 4PM after some 7 hours of hiking. Compared to previous visits we were in remarkably good shape: in the past we have arrived here and chosen to take the elevator rather than walk up or down a single flight of stairs. Clearly we are much fitter than we have ever been (from a hiking perspective), which is most pleasing!
Grindelwald, by the way, is as "touristy" as it gets in Switzerland, due to its proximity to the Eiger / Moench / Jungfrau trio, but despite this it manages to be a very pleasant place to stay -- the beauty of the surroundings somehow overwhelms the commercialism, at least for me.
I was pleased, however, seeing all the people, to have booked our hotel a week in advance. This was further in advance than I had originally intended when planning the trip, but for a couple of reasons I have changed my thinking as far as reservation strategy is concerned:
o I quickly found that reserving accommodations on weekends can be difficult. Even now, reserving two weeks ahead for weekends, I find I can often get only my third or fourth choice because the others are booked.
o we have found that the incidence of bad weather (i.e., sufficient to make us wish we weren't hiking), is lower than expected. And the incidence of awful weather (i.e., sufficient to make it impossible for us to take the route we had planned to take) is very low. We have been hiking for forty days (30 stages) now, and only once has the weather been awful (going over the Bockscharte to the Prinz-Luitpold-Haus in Stage 12)... and even then we were able to hike it anyway. So the need to delay making reservations until the last minute is much lower than I expected it to be.
o Lastly, the number of days where the hike is truly dangerous in awful weather, and where there are no lower-level or safer options, is quite low, so the risk of having to change a string of reservations is very low. Moreover, even if awful weather and such a no-option day were to coincide, since we have many rest days planned in I'd probably only have to change two or three days at the most.
I thus am now booking a week or ten days ahead for weekday stops, and two weeks for weekends or bottle-necks (where there are few alternatives). Thus far we haven't had to break or change any reservations, and we remain exactly on schedule. However, we are now entering August (high season), and afterwards comes September (higher likelihood of awful weather), so I'd be surprised if our record is still perfect by the time we get to Monaco.
One final thought: it now seems quite natural to say "by the time we get to Monaco", which is a big change. We seem to have settled into a comfortable routine: all three of us remarked on this last night, when, after a full day of hiking we nevertheless had the energy to spend a couple of hours before dinner in the excellent wellness facility of the Hotel Regina where we are staying. Our various aches and pains seem to be diminishing from day to day, and seven hours of hiking (which corresponds to a planned 8 to 8.5 hour hike, since we now find that we hike 15-20% faster than the estimated times) now seems like a comfortable distance.
Pyschologically too we are settling down, as some come to accept the plan, others work out how to balance group interaction with private time, and as all benefit from the reduced levels of stress associated with chronic pain and fatigue.
It is starting to feel as if we might make it....
