Photos 1-5

I started off trying to write a full trip report of the two weeks Erik and I spent backpacking across Switzerland, but I was unhappy with how it was going. The writing felt monotonous, the pictures were secondary to this long, long narrative, and it doesn’t need to be that way. So I’m trying again, this time, the writing will be directly in service of the scenes I’ve selected. Here are photos 1-5 of my 25 favorite film photos from Swtizerland.

Photo 1 is of Erik, walking through an alley in Zurich. We spent a full zero day here, trying to get some sleep to beat our jetlag, getting the last few supplies, and exploring the city. Zurich felt quite relatively small, but was very charming. And the devotion to public transit and cycling was immediately on display everywhere.

Photo 2 gets right into the heart of things. We had just taken the train from Zurich to Scuol, a small town on the Eastern edge of Switzerland, pressed right up against Austria. This incredible church, river, and covered bridge were just 1 mile into our ride, and the Alps, looming just outside the frame, were where we were immediately heading towards, with a LOT of climbing right out the gate. On this first day of riding, we rode only 33 miles, but had 6,000′ of climbing, off-road and at altitude. Quite the wake up call

Photo 3

The landscape on Day 1 was immediately mind-melting. Alp after alp in every direction, many still holding snow from the prior winter. We had wonderful weather that first day, with clouds intermingling with the sun adding to the drama at every new vista. We were also quite remote, at this point, we had already passed the tiny, dead-end, hiking hamlet of S-Charl, and were off along a herder’s doubletrack with a few farmhouses like the one that can be sorta seen in the photo above. Along the way, we were greeted by incessant but jubilant bells of Swiss cattle that roamed everywhere.

Photo 4

Still on day 1, we had dropped out of one range of Alps, found the grocery store we were counting on was closed, were saved by a friendly woman at a bar who made us some sandwiches, and were immediately back into the full brunt of climbing. We were heading into what was the most remote area of the entire trip, Val Mora. The wonderful cows in this area were unfortunately inundated with flies, and the grades of these roads were just steep enough to make us get off and walk quite a bit. This road felt like an eternity, but eventually we made it to a pass, bombed down the otherside, and made a campsite near a major river and some woods. Just an hour later, a massive thunderstorm rolled over the top of us, really hammering us that we were in an adventure.

Photo 5 is from the morning of day 2. We awoke to an extremely moody day and set-off down some raw, river-adjacent singletrack. There were many scree piles that clearly continually tumbled down the slopes each winter, yet somehow, someone had already been through and cleared them for us to travel through. We would from here continue to a reservoir that marked the border with Italy. We would stop in to the little Italian ski town of Livigno, and then have a full hell hike-a-bike out of town and back into Switzerland. Later that afternoon, the weather cleared, we had some wonderful backcountry descending, and then a long paved road into St. Moritz where we stayed in a hotel and dried out.