Trail 57: A Tale of Survival
The first peak destination
Sometime around the third hour of our descent toward Brunig, Switzerland, I was thinking, This has got to be the most arduous experience of my life. By the third hour of the descent, my twisted knee was flaring in pain at every step, and my ankles were flinching against the terrible support from my hiking shoes (expensive, name-brand footwear that let me down). Isaac and Josh had chosen a beautiful, but very tough, route up from Sorenburg to a point called Schonbiel (loosely translated, “beautiful view”), and then a gradual descent along a ridge line before plunging into lower elevation by way of switchbacks that snaked their way through numerous mountainside cow fields. Unfortunately for all three of us, some nut in the Swiss equivalent of a Parks and Recreation department mislabeled the trail somewhere around Schonbiel, so that a marker pointed us in the opposite direction for our descent. This is when the fun really began.
They were mocking me
Still on our way up
Last Saturday in the Swiss Alps was cloudy and wet. As soon as one pass of rain ended, another would begin to billow up along the far high ridge, and eventually you knew from experience that you were about to be soaked again, so you better take in the partially unobstructed view while you could. Because of this, and the fact that the top of an Alp is not necessarily the warmest place to hang around, it was best to keep moving. Unfortunately, as I mentioned, someone mismarked the trail, and we wasted an hour and a half hiking, backtracking, rehiking, and then rebacktracking our trail along this ridge, pictured below, in a simple attempt to begin our descent.
Back and forth, back and forth...
No, Switzerland, 57 doesn't go to the right!
By the time we finally decided to go against the marker and venture (go figure!) downhill, we were all a little worse for the wear. However, for the first time in a few hours, we were blessed with a considerable stretch of sunlight before being plunged back into gray gloom. It was at this point that I took my first spill upon the slick, muddy path. I did not know it at the time, laughing in spite of myself and my soiled backside, but this was the beginning of the hardship I was to suffer over the next five hours. It was not long after picking myself up and continuing the descent that my right knee began to whine with minor pain, and each time I had the opportunity to stop, I would massage it curiously, wondering why it was hurting. (A bright hiker would recognize that descending rapidly down a mountain with a heavy pack on one’s back is enough to do it, and throw in a little unsure footing and a slip and the reason for the pain would be obvious.)
Around hour three of the descent, when the trail disappeared into mucky cow crap and open farm fields soaked with rain, my knee no longer felt merely tweaked. It was screaming in agony … and we still had a considerable distance to go in order to reach the “schlaf im Stroh” (Sleep in Straw) before dark.
In the end, the Alps beat me. Actually, that doesn’t quite paint a vivid enough picture of my struggle. The Alps vanquished me. Now, I’m not the kind of person who insists he is in shape when it is obvious he is not. And ten hours of hiking in the Alps is rough enough for anybody. However, I truly believe that if my knee had cooperated instead of faltering, I would have been able to make it to our destination. There is a kind of third wind that comes over you even after your second wind has been expelled hours ago, and it will surprise you how long it lingers, pushing you forward, allowing you to put one foot in front of another, one foot in front of another, one foot in front of another…
We reached Lugern, about an hour to an hour and a half hike from our goal, around 9 PM. There was perhaps forty-five minutes to an hour of light left, but that did not matter. I was lagging behind my more capable friends farther than I had all day, and it was all I could do to make it up or down even the gentlest of slopes. We had to stop.
And so we did. And all was well, after all. There happened to be another schlaf im Stroh in that very town, and since all three of us were super-saturated with a day’s worth of high elevation weather, and all three of us were weary from wandering through countless cow pastures following a trail we often doubted we were still on, we found the musty smell of a barn and the crackling sound of bedding straw a more than adequate place to collapse for the night.
The unplanned bus ride back to our car in Sorenburg was beautiful, though.
The clouds parted long enough to snap this shot
The descent into Cow Pasture Land
schlaf im Stroh
