Photos 11-15

The first photo in this series picks up from the last set in town of Vals. This isn’t a particularly good photo, but it does really give insight to the tremendously beautiful feeling of the buildings in Vals. Every home had so many details to take in; the centuries old wood, the decorative carvings, the enamel house numbers, and the teardrop shingles. Plus nearly every windowsill was adorned with a planter filled with cheerful flowers like the above photo. What this photo doesn’t capture is the many buildings that had gothic-lettered, Germanic-Christian protective creeds, writ large on the sides of many of the houses. A surprising visual motif seemingly unique to this part of Switzerland.

I’m going to cheat on this post and count the above two photos as a 2 for 1 as they were taken in the same place. From the warm Portra 400 of the first photo straight back into good old Tri-X. These two photos were taken near the end of a tremendously long day of climbing. We had left Vals early, enjoyed a long highway descent to Ilanz, and then began a day with over 8,000′ of loaded climbing, much of it chunky double and singletrack. We again were lucky enough to access another tremendous piece of backcountry, the Val Maighels, a stunning, remote, all-singletrack alpine valley. We had originally planned on camping near the above lake, but wild camping is frowned upon in Switzerland and I was nervous about being disrespectful of the local rules with hikers about, but then as we stood in this incredible place, a huge storm bellowed up over the mountains and it was definitely time to get out of there. The descent was fully proper downhill mountain biking through very technical, eroded hiking trails. I was having a blast navigating it on the fully-loaded bike, Erik a little less so, but eventually, we made our way to the town of Andermatt, had a wonderful dinner, and drank a beer while watching the tour at an empty pub.

The photo above is Erik riding through Andermatt the morning after we stayed the night there in a campground just outside of town. I was a little grumpy about camping in the rain when there were so many hotels here, but the campground was mostly full of other bike-tourers (nearly all on road or gravel set-ups), and it was nice to see so many other international tourers enjoying the alps. Andermatt was a pleasant ski-town, and the flag of the area, which can sorta be seen in the above photo, of a bear, will someday serve as a trip tattoo for Erik and I when we get together next.

From Andermatt, on day 6 of riding, we took on our one highway pass of the trip, the Sustenstrasse climb to the Sustenpass. Erik had been easily out climbing me the entire trip, but I was really feeling it on the relatively paved road climb here when I preferred to ride together. Erik was gracious to hold back and we trucked it out. The other riders we saw on road and gravel bikes certainly seemed to be enjoying it a bit more than us on our mountain bikes, but we trucked along and had some solid views on the way. Unfortunately as we got near the pass, it was totally socked in and there were no views to be had, so we quickly popped on all our layers, and enjoyed a tremendous highway descent on the other side, easily passing cars and whooping it up.

We rode some backroads doubletrack for a while, and eventually stopped to have lunch at one of the thousands of Volgs dotting the country. From there, we rode a bit further and then I had routed us take a Swisspost bus to cut out some 3500′ of steep road climbing. For whatever reason, this 30 minute bus ride was relatively astronomically expensive, something like $75 a piece, but it did save us a massive climb on a tiny road in the fog, so I think it was worth it. We were dropped off in the nowhere-ville of Schwarzwaldalp, basically a bus station and a cafe set high in the mountains of an often-impassible, single-lane, high-elevation route to Grindelwald. We were surrounded by some of the most famous Swiss mountains, the Eiger and the Mittlehorn amongst others, but we were still fully socked in by fog and couldn’t take in any of it. The photo above is as clear as it ever got, and by the snow at our level, we could certainly tell that we were high up. A couple of Germans on loaded gravel bikes rode with Erik just ahead of me for a while, and then turned off for a high remote hotel right as the mist transitioned into full rain. We had a couple more miles to ours and pushed on in soaking pea soup, before surreally arriving at a bustling ski-chalet, packed with international tourists. The chalet had a dozen rooms in a space felt a combination space station and Ikea showroom reject from the early 80s, but the little room’s beds were comfortable, the room was warm, and the dinner was good, so we settled in to our funny bunker and wondered if we’d get to take in what we’d come to see the next day.