I wore out my FitBit.
At least, that’s the spin I’m putting on it – it may have got some water
in it after being worn through one too many rainshowers, but given that it
packed in on a day when I did I much more ambitious mountain climb than the one
I did a couple of days ago, “worn out” seems just about as likely an
explanation as the rain one.
That’s right, not content with climbing one alp, when I got to
Lauterbrunnen I thought I’d go for a little walk up a path which people in the
village just above Lauterbrunnen used to take when walking to Mass each Sunday,
and then I kind of got carried away.
I certainly can’t attribute this feat to fitness, as anyone who knows me
knows I am a long way from the peak of my fitness right now, so instead I am
putting this remarkable achievement down to sheer bloody-mindedness – that
fortunately fairly latent trait in me which, once activated, gives me a
stubbornness rather like that of a pit bull, a single-minded determination to
do what I’ve set my mind to which nothing save my expiration could prevent me
from achieving and even then my spook would probably come back and finish what
it had started in human form anyway ... There were many times when I cursed
this trait in myself on the way up the mountain, and many more on the way down,
but there’s no denying it can spur me on to do things I never would have
believed possible (while simultaneously giving thanks for the fact that I don’t
get stubbornly set on things very often).
The road up to the village (Wengen) was incredibly steep – I found myself thinking often of those poor buggers who in days gone by had to walk up and down it to go to church (they now have a church of their own).
The road up to the village (Wengen) was incredibly steep – I found myself thinking often of those poor buggers who in days gone by had to walk up and down it to go to church (they now have a church of their own).
It was a pretty spekky walk though.
After this there were many more hours of walking before I reached the
almost-top of the Lauberhorn, where a famous ski competition starts. I didn’t
make it to the absolute top because it was getting late, I was getting low on
provisions, and to be honest I was so high that I was getting a bit nervy – an
accident up there would be a real problem. So I started the route back, giving
a wide berth to a herd of cows with calves (I’ve been faced with a herd of
nursing mother-cows defending their bubs before and it’s bloody scarey, even
when you’re on the other side of a solid fence, as I was in that case –
somewhere like this, on the side of a steep mountain and no fences in sight, it
was just unthinkable).
The village that I was camped in was down at the bottom of the huge trough you can see across the bottom of this photo. To give you some idea of scale, on the other side of the trough from where I'm standing, you can see a few dots which are another village. The trough itself was about 500 metres deep.
While walking almost on a level with a glacier on the crown jewel of
this particular set of alps, a mountain called Jungfrau, but across a wide
valley from it, I heard a tremendous rumbling and looked over to see a small
piece of the glacier break off and tumble down a cliff. I certainly gave
comprehensive thanks for the wide valley separating me from the glacier –
there’s nothing like even this fairly minor natural event to remind you what a
small, soft little thing a human is.
A foreign landscape: looking up from the hiking trail towards Jungfrau. The edge of the glacier which can be seen at the centre of this photo is where the avalanche occurred.
In the other direction: some wildflowers. Ooh, pretty.
After numerous hours of walking downhill (which, given the steepness of
the slope, was unbelievably almost harder than the walk up), I was relieved to
take a long hot shower and climb into the car – I’d been so high and pushed
myself so hard that I’d spent a lot of the day feeling like I was well and
truly out of my comfort zone. Being back in it never felt so good.
Nearly there! On the path between Wengen and Lauterbrunnen. My camp was just a little way beyond the waterfall you can see at the right of the picture.