the great bernese alps

....our switzerland trip....filled with the usual craziness of hitch-hiking, camping, train-catching, and mounting climbing that moves me. the best part of our adventure a 3-day intensive hike through the alps, covering many, many miles, and seeing some of the most beautiful landscape i have ever seen. it was beyond breathtaking.

...i came to realize how small i am in comparison to such an expanse of beauty.

please note that the photos are more about showing the land we hiked and what we saw than anything else, but hopefully they are still enjoyable. maybe they will inspire people to go visit the bernese alps. the place and the people come highly recommend.

it may be my favorite country yet.

the matterhorn in zermatt, switerzland.
zermatt is a car-less town, so we had to take a tiny train to the little village.

our tenting site...located right about the trains (it was a rumbling night) and the exact landing site for para-gliders.
we were lucky we were at breakfast when they landed.

this is the hostel that we stayed in our first night in switzerland. it was in a tiny, tiny town called gimmelwald, which you could only reach
by gondola as it was on a high cliff in the mountains. after a long day of traveling from milan, italy, the hot tub and peppermint
schnapps hot chocolate was exactly what we needed. ironically, the whole place was filled with americans.

after our night in the mountain hostel, we packed our bags and set off for a town further up the mountain (murren) to get provisions for our treck. this is the cable car that takes you from one town to the next, and back down to the valley.

ab...not too far into our hike, day 1. the junfrau, the tallest mountain in the alps, is in the background. ps. i should have titled this post "andrew and the mountains" due to the large number of photos of well, andrew and mountains.

on our way to our first hut! again of the jungfrau (which we found out we could have climbed!!)

this is the "rutsookhutte" that we hiked to on the first day. we initially thought this room was locked and so had set up the tent outside. only in our renewed pursuit for matches (our lighters were failing), did we discover this wonderful little room where we ate and slept.

the sunset outside our door.

day two, our early climb down the valley after leaving the hut. we would eventually aside up the
left side of the mountain in the background (not visible here).

further down the side of the mountain on day two.

this is after climbing down the valley and climbing up the side of the next mountain. as seen above, we then
walked along the side of this climb, and only realized later how high up we were.

this is the same path as in the photo above. pretty magnificent.

you can seen the steep fall away to the right of andrew.

resting after a lunch of salami, bread and an apple. at this point we had hiked for over 5 hours and were pretty tired.
we didn't know it, but we had almost another 4 hours until reaching our final destination.

coming to the end of the cliff, we had to cross a huge river. andrew is on the far right.

this is after crossing the river and ascending up the other side. this was the mountain that we walked along far up near the top. if you look closely you can almost see the path. the hotel that was closed for the season, which is where we stopped to eat lunch, is down near the bottom of the frame in the center.

we were just waiting for gollum to pop up somewhere as this felt very lord of the rings ish.

victorious!! very tired, sore, cold, and thankful, we reached the hut that we had been aiming for. it proved to be much farther than we expected
(it is about 6:30pm here and we had set off at 8:30 in the morning), but the warmth and the view was worth it. it was situated in
this bowl, just beneath a glacier and the surrounding mountains, as a base camp for climbers.

the view from the hut. you can actually climb up through that pass to another hut that is in the middle of the glacier. we really wanted to do it, but didn't have the right gear. an adventure for a later date.

the hut! there was a pool of ice cold water just behind the hut that was the most amazing color of light steel blue.

our little kitchen! the bunk-beds are to the right of this area.

view from the hut. by the end of the trip, we had hiked the entire valley, but from up above in the mountains. the town we started
in is in the set a little below the large green centered right, and we would descend on the other side of the valley.

3rd day, going down the really ice path that we had climbed up the night before to the hut in the as it was getting dark.
the side fell away pretty sharp to the left.

a view back up at our hut and the mountains behind it on the morning of the 3rd day. if can just barely make out the tip of the hut,
located right below the white mountains, a little to the left of andrew. when we had been looking for it the night before, this is about all we saw.

same beautiful wasteland as seen above.

i didn't include any photos of the end of our hike, but after hiking all the way down to the valley and then taking the gondola up to the same hostel again, we had a restful night of sleep. the next morning we headed off to freiburg, germany, a really cool university town that was extremely cheap (and also has the best pastries!). the university of freiburg is the oldest university in Europe, and is very prestiguous. we stayed in this cool bohemian hostel with over a hundred beds and rented bikes for the day that we were there and rode all over the city. this is a shoot from above the city.
the town comes highly recommended. go visit!