We woke up the earliest we’ve have so far, at 8 AM. Planning for the hike to start at 10 AM (given that it’s about 6 hour long), we prepared and had some breakfast.
The forecast wasn’t very good - rain starting at 14:00. I’ve decided to take my backpack with me with warmer clothes. Just before leaving, I realized that the camera ran out of charge, so we had to postpone it by about 15 minutes.
Drive there alone was pretty crazy. We got way higher than the village we are staying in, Ergisch, which was already really high. Although there are some small villages around the road, it is quite an isolated place. The hike started from 1900m of elevation.
We parked the car, and the parking was paid. The parkometer was very confusing, and I wasted the 4 franks I got earlier on it without it even giving a ticket… I felt a bit sad that I won’t bring the coins back home now.
About 150 meters in elevation, we saw some wild deer! That was quite a surprising sight.
The forest we went through was so full of berries! It had lingonberries, raspberries, blueberries. I collected and ate a lot of blueberries and raspberries. I haven’t ate nice wild blueberries, which are my favorite berries, for a really long time now.
As we ascended, the beautiful view on the valley appeared. Not long after it opened up, we went up the hill to the small hut with a little praying place.
It had a note written in German, which we first thought was simply a prayer, until I translated it:
«To the person who took the light blue rosary from the Madonna. It will not bring you any blessing. For me, it was a beautiful memory of my mother. Perhaps you have the greatness to bring it back? I would be very happy.»
I was quite moved by it… I hope they get their rosary back some day.
The ascend has finally stopped for some time, and we could enjoy our flat walk with beautiful views on the valley.
The walk didn’t last very long before we had to start hiking up again. Our destination was Turtmannhütte, which you can see on one of the photos.
Just a bit before we reached the hut, we saw a nice little shelf, where we’ve decided we won’t have a better view on the glacier and the valley, so we stopped to rest here for a bit a bit and have a snack. Tasty fuet.
We’ve finally reached the hut, which was the highest point during this hike. At that point I thought that it’s perfectly timed - it’s about the limit of uphill hiking I could do. The hut was nice and offered food, drinks and a place to rest. Well, you need cash for any of that, so we didn’t get anything.
I asked for where to refill the water, and she told us that theres a stream behind the hut thats from her words: "not drinkable, but if you drink it, nothing will happen". If you wanted the «drinkable» water (which I’m pretty sure probably comes from the same spot), you’d have to pay. We just refilled the bottles there and were fine drinking it.
It was only down from here on. Through a very rocky hill, we went down to the dam, which was neat. I wish we weren’t so tired at that point so we could go off-track for a bit and visit one of the hills close to the glacier waterfall. While going down, I had headache (which I never do) and a bit of lightheadedness. I think this mightve been mild altitude sickness.
We went down and down until we were back at the car, very tired. The houses on top of that hill made me think that you feel at an incredible peace if you live in them…
I wanted to play some games, but I guess everyone was too tired for that, so we ate our lunch and just watched The Cube. It was too surreal for me, but the setting was interesting.
