A Bargain with the Mountains

They crowd the slopes in blue and violet, yellow and white, each one competing for my attention. I know most by name and challenge myself to count the varieties, but some send me reaching for my phone. A name eludes me, and ten minutes disappear with it. What a lovely way to lose time. Soon we’re comparing discoveries before drifting back into our own rhythms.

There is a mountain pass somewhere above us, but I don't feel rushed.

I've left daily races behind. For now. 

Here, time is abundant.

I can squander it on a flower.

I can stand still long enough for the mist to bead on my skin. Let the rain soak into my hair before I finally decide I should probably put on my jacket. Conversation moves up and down the trail, and there are long stretches when I walk inside my own thoughts.

The mountains seem to make room for both.

That morning, I shouldered my pack and glanced once around the room I wouldn't return to. Outside, fog raised goosebumps on my skin, and the Eiger, incandescent with alpenglow the night before, had been erased by cloud.

Everything I need is on my back, and my bed tonight lies somewhere ahead, on the other side of a mountain I can already see. 

I step into the morning and let yesterday recede behind me. 

There is a beautiful simplicity to traveling this way.

Somewhere along the first climb, the pack loses its edges. The straps disappear against my shoulders, its weight absorbed into the rhythm of my stride, until I can no longer tell where it ends and I begin.

And I want the climb.

I have always loved the physical bargain of a hard ascent: the mountain asks something of me, and I am willing to give it. There is no negotiating the elevation. Every foot has to be earned.

And the mountains answer in kind.

The reward waits just beyond sight. Just when one valley has become the whole world, I reach the pass.

The earth falls away on the other side. 

New mountains. A new valley. A trail stitching its way toward all of it.

Every pass is a curtain being drawn back.

Perhaps that is why these mountains never feel finished. There is always another what's over there?

Switzerland offers its own peculiar kind of remoteness. A red train threads its way through the valley far below. Somewhere beyond the next bend, a mountain hut may be serving lunch. I can send my daughter a goat selfie and receive her laugh before the goat has finished trying to eat my pack straps.

Here, remoteness is an illusion I’m happy to believe.

The illusion is a fragile one. Switzerland teems with tourists in summer. Villages swell. Trains fill. Gondolas spill people onto mountaintops already bearing the weight of their own popularity.

But walking loosens the crowd. 

The farther my feet carry me, the more the noise thins, until the mountains have swallowed it altogether.
             
And still, civilization has a way of reappearing.

I crest a summit where a gondola has been quietly delivering people all along.

Someone looks at the trail behind me, then at me.

“Wait, you walked here?”

Yes.

Do I enjoy their disbelief a little?

I smile.

There is something delicious about arriving this way and knowing precisely what it cost to reach it. I turn and search for where the morning began, now improbably far below.

I walked here.

Mountain days are generous with their humility.

The summit is only half the story.

I still have to get down.

Between Engelberg and Kandersteg, the Via Alpina rises and falls for 63 miles, putting more than 22,000 feet of climbing into our legs. There are passes whose names have become inseparable in my mind from the effort required to cross them. 

Sefinenfurgge. Hohtürli.

They are hard.

I want them to be.

The descent eventually extracts its own price. My stride becomes less exuberant. My knees begin registering every downward step. The flowers that arrested me that morning receive more fleeting admiration. But far below, an improbable shard of blue beckons from the valley, and I chase it downward, drawn by the promise of glacial water soothing my tired feet.

Will I jump in when I reach it?

Yes.

The shock of cold is so complete it alarms my Garmin.

No, Garmin, not an emergency. 

Painfully rewarding. 

A fairly good metaphor for the day.

By late afternoon, the group contracts again. We have accumulated the small mythology of a day spent walking together. We arrive at the inn carrying different aches and the same appetite.

Shoes off. Shower. Dinner. Feet up.

Finish line number two.

Earned exhaustion has its own kind of luxury. The shower is hotter. Dinner tastes better. Around the table, the day begins its transformation into story, burnished by laughter and the quiet intimacy of having crossed the same mountain.

I don't want the hiking made easier.

I want the recovery made better.

And Switzerland understands that bargain remarkably well. 

Rain and rock. Wildflowers and glacial water. Hours spent wandering through my thoughts, and a table waiting at the end of them, surrounded by people who understand why tomorrow we’ll wake up and ask the mountains for more. 

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Fatigue softens around the edges.

We shoulder our packs.

Eventually, the names on the map acquire weight. They cease to be destinations and become something I carry with me.

I know the distance between them in my legs.

The world narrows to the width of the trail and somehow grows larger for it. Wildflowers interrupt ambition. Mountain passes peel back the edges of the world. Solitude comes and goes, giving way to conversation, shared exhaustion, and laughter around a dinner table.

And the mountains never seem to run out of themselves.

By the time I'm headed home, there is still trail dust on my shoes.

Already, I’m wondering what the next pass is hiding.




Hike with us. 
Swiss Hiking Tours leads small-group hiking trips through Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland, including the Via Alpina from Engelberg to Kandersteg.