A Day in the Mountains
One I want to share with you
I watch the clouds drift slowly across the peak, briefly hiding it before revealing again the immense rock massif we stand in front of. To our right, the drop is steep, plunging at least 500 meters into the valley below. To our left, there's another sharp descent, and I catch my first glimpse of the steel wire embedded into the cliff just a few metres in front of us. I like these hiking markers, they almost shout adventure and at the same time give a sense of navigation. Today I don’t have to navigate as I am hiking with Werner, my mum’s cousin and probably the most mountainous member of our family. As a Swiss local who is hiking every week, he knows the route of our day tour by heart.
The mountain ridge we walk along is covered in short grass that sways with the steady, pleasant breeze. Further down, at the start of our hike, we came across blue gentians in bloom - I’d never seen so many before. Growing nearby were several of the rare, delicate mountain orchids: pale purple, white, and yellow ones that, with their perfectly rounded petals, looked a bit like tiny slippers. Now we’re too high up, no more gentians, no more orchids - the vegetation has changed. Now it’s only rocks, grass and these little pink flowers that cover the stones like a dotted carpet.
Far off in the distance, beyond the still snow-dusted peak of the mountain in front of us, I can see the antenna of the Säntis, the tallest mountain in northeastern Switzerland. It’s become a landmark that, on a clear day, lets you see into six countries: Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, France, and Italy.
It feels surreal to be here. Everything has been perfect since the morning. After days of rain, we caught the first day of sunshine. Not the boring kind, when there is only blue sky and sun but the slightly dramatic one. An ongoing change between sunshine and dramatic cloud formations that constantly transform the landscape. Sunny, clear views can shift into threatening ones within minutes once dark clouds approach. And just moments later, the clouds are gone and you are back in a serene alpine world.
Below the short ridge in front of us, a narrow trail winds through the landscape, a path so slender that it almost disappears into the terrain. That's the one we need to reach by climbing down along the steel wire. We’ve been hiking for about four hours now, with at least three more to go. And only now, standing on top of the mountain with the silence of the valley in the distance, slightly exhausted from the steep climb, do I realise just how much I needed this. The 4:30 a.m. alarm, that I hadn’t been looking forward to the day before, was worth it. It rewarded us with the silence of the Appenzeller Land at sunrise, the fresh, crisp mountain air of the early morning hours and now this incredible view and the feeling I only get in the mountains. The feeling of being truly connected to nature, and something I feel even more rarely, the feeling of being connected to myself.
We reach the slender path, with cliffs on our right as steep as those on our left that drop into the valley. Every year, a few hikers don’t make it back from this trail. It demands your full attention. Your presence. And all the noise quiets down.
That’s what I love about the mountains. They almost force you into your body. All those ideas about mindfulness, presence and trust - they’re easy to talk about over coffee but to really feel them, to feel them in your body as you walk along a ridge that could kill you if you stop paying attention and if you stop trusting yourself, that’s something completely different. The mountains don’t speak, but they do teach you a lot.
After our hike along the slender path, we descend to a hut that hasn’t opened for the season yet. So we sit next to it on the rocks that have fallen from the cliff above. With a Cervelat (a traditional Swiss sausage) and a piece of bread, we take a break and watch a show put on by a group of marmots. They always appear in groups and warn each other with bird-like whistles when danger is near. It's quiet, and we just sit, watch, and listen to this little spectacle. One of them runs around, hiding underneath a rock that seems to be the entrance to a burrow, while the other takes its position a few meters away, overlooking the whole scene. The silence is broken by two chamois running down a field of rubble beside us before disappearing behind the rocks. It almost feels like a perfectly rehearsed choreography.
After observing this spectacle for a while, we shoulder our backpacks and continue along the trail. The path leads us across a snowfield, leftovers from the past weeks’ heavy and unusually late snowfalls, which had cut off entire mountain villages from the outside world.
The sun has climbed higher now, and with every meter we hike down it gets warmer and warmer. We pass alpine fields that look as if they’ve exploded with wildflowers in every colour and shade imaginable. Small houses are built into the hillsides and stones, like hobbit homes. Just ahead of us, a mountain lake appears, a deep blue stretch of water, perfectly embedded in between two mountains.
It’s so idyllic that I feel like knocking on the mountains to check if we’re actually in The Truman Show. It’s so beautiful, I almost don’t trust it and for a moment, I seriously consider the possibility that this is all part of a perfect set and we’re just acting in it.
It’s early afternoon now, and as we approach the lake, we’re slowly re-entering the ‘real world’ with crowds of tourists walking around the water. With the people, the illusion fades, and the seemingly staged perfection somehow, at least partially, begins to disappear. It’s a slow transition back to the parking spot where we left in the morning.
Seven hours in another world. Present. Closer to nature, closer to myself and I promise myself to do this more often.
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