In which we do some "urban" hiking, "easy-peasy" is revealed to be much more difficult than expected, and the perils of splitting up the group are revealed.
It was pretty cold and a little windy when we set off from our hotel at Simplon Pass... despite it being after 9:30AM. The late start was due to the hike being relatively short (estimated at 5.5 hours), And the cold was due to the fact that it has simply been a bad summer in this part of the Alps. I've been speaking with our hosts along the way and they have all said the same thing: in July the weather was awful, and in August it has been much colder than usual, with the result that the number of visitors has been low (which might also explain the number of "For Sale" signs we have seen in the various villages we have passed through).
However, despite having to remind myself from time to time that it was summer, overall we have been, IMHO, very fortunate with the weather. Cool is better than hot when you are hiking over passes... and we have been doing a lot of those. Moreover in the meantime I'd guess that less than 5% of our hiking time has been spent in rain-gear....
And today was another rain-free day... but for all that not without its challenges. The first of which presented itself almost immediately as we were unable to find the trail down from the Simplon Pass in the direction we needed to go. It turned out that there were major roadworks being done just after the pass, and where the trail normally passed was now a building site. However, since it was a Saturday no-one was working and so we were able to make our way through it... albeit with a bit of scrambling. We saw a sign in the midst of the construction area saying that the hiking trail was closed... which would have been more than minorly irritating if it had been a week day, since there was no other easy way to get to where we needed to go... other than walking through the road tunnel alongside the traffic :-(.
It is this sort of complexity that makes planning long hikes so much more challenging than one would think: it is not trivial to arrange to pass building sites on weekends or holidays.
:-)
After a short steep climb of about 250m we reached a balcony path that we planned to hike along for the rest of the day. We could see our destination, Rosswald, just across a deep valley, but since we'd be going along the contour lines into each side valley we would be hiking further. As it turned out, "further" was "much further", and with much more in the way of little ups and downs than were visible on the map -- instead of three it took us almost four hours to get to our lunch place, the Bortelhütte, and there was a very steep climb just before we got to the hut. Not so "easy-peasy" after all!
After lunch the hike went from tiring to technically challenging. There were no more large climbs, but the trail went up and down along cliff-side trails that made me a little uneasy, and I'm pretty resistant. Thomas, who has a touch of vertigo, found them to be at the limit of what he felt comfortable with... so when we came to a trail sign that offered two options to get to our destination, one longer, and the other shorter but marked as being only for those with no fear of heights (the previous trail had had no such warning), he decided that he would take the longer path.
Which was a good decision: the shorter path went along an aqueduct taking water to Rosswald that had been set into the side of a near vertical cliff. Spectacular... but scary! I paid great attention to where I was putting my feet, only glancing out and down into the void when I was standing still. Thomas would have been way out of his comfort zone.
When we got to the end of the difficult section, Russ decided to wait for Thomas where the alternative trail he had taken rejoined ours. I pushed on with Père Ephrem, feeling an acute need to find modern plumbing facilities :-(. Just before we arrived in Rosswald about 45 minutes later Russ called and said that Thomas had not yet appeared (which was surprising because his trail should only have been about 15 minutes longer than ours). Oh-oh.
From my makeshift office (in the aforementioned modern plumbing facilities :-) I called Thomas and found out that he had turned back after his trail also turned out to be vertiginous. Then he had tried another trail that was signposted to Rosswald, but it took such a meandering route that he thought it would be dark before he got there, so he turned back from that one too. When I reached him he was about to head down to find a road we thought we had seen from across the valley... but since that "road" was the aqueduct we had walked along, I told him that that was doomed to failure as well and that he should just go back to the original plan. I then called Russ to let him know the situation and he decided to walk towards Thomas and in fact met him at the most difficult point, so was able to help him through it.
So, all was well that ended well, and Russell's kindness in choosing to wait for Thomas turned out to be exceedingly helpful... he's a good fellow, Russ, and especially good to have with one in the mountains!
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