Patterico's Pontifications

8/30/2013

Hiking the Lauterbrunnen Valley, Switzerland

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 9:59 pm



The hike from Grutschalp to Mürren.

Screen Shot 2013-08-30 at 9.51.23 PM

23 Responses to “Hiking the Lauterbrunnen Valley, Switzerland”

  1. humping hills is w*rk…especially at altitude. hard to believe anyone does it for fun….

    i could get a 113 down that trail, and riding beats walking, every day.

    “Death Before Dismount!”

    redc1c4 (abd49e)

  2. Beautiful.

    mg (31009b)

  3. Wow.

    Look at those mountains!

    Dustin (655264)

  4. How high up is that? Looks like a long way from the big city.

    AZ Bob (c99389)

  5. The hills are alive with the sounds of music…

    Lovely scene!

    Patricia (be0117)

  6. How was the food?

    mg (31009b)

  7. humping hills is w*rk…especially at altitude.

    You didn’t make those mountains. Somebody else made that happen.

    papertiger (c2d6da)

  8. Yeah, the Swiss government is responsible for having those roads paved. So you can’t take credit for walking on them. Or whatever.

    Elephant Stone (6a6f37)

  9. #5 That was Austria. But close enough I guess.

    Rodney King's Spirit (ae12ec)

  10. #6 I can answer, it was bland.

    Rodney King's Spirit (ae12ec)

  11. The food . . . had a lot of cheese.

    But was delicious.

    Patterico (9c670f)

  12. I guess you are allowed to have nice things if you foreign policy is based upon strict neutrality.

    JVW (23867e)

  13. Switzerland is one of the few places on earth that seems never to change much and lets travelers know for sure they are “someplace else”. It’s been a while, but I still cherish a photo of a younger me hugging the largest smelliest droolingest dog (a Black Mountain Dog/Newfie?) I’ve ever encountered, taken there against a serene Alpine backdrop.

    elissa (1a5407)

  14. Patterico, it looks lovely, and I’m glad you and your family were able to visit.

    Why Switzerland, by the way?

    Reminds me of a story. I was taking a training course in the 1990s, and one of the instructors was an older Swiss fellow, who had an American wife. She had become a Swiss citizen.

    Anyway, he was railing about our gun-mad sexist and racist culture at lunch one day. While on a US fellowship, incidentally.

    I knew my fellow students weren’t students of geopolitics or history, so I decided to have some fun.

    “Hans,” I asked. “Did you tell everyone here that you have a fully automatic weapon in your home in Switzerland, with thousands of rounds of ammunition?”

    He goggled at me. “But it is part of my service…”

    “You bet,” I interrupted. But Americans haven’t been allowed to own fully automatic weapons since, oh, the 1930s. By our gun-crazy laws.”

    I paused.

    “Oh, and how does Switzerland treat Turkish visiting workers, since Americans are so racist?”

    He hemmed and hawed.

    “Finally, your wife became a Swiss citizen in the late 1960s, right?”

    He nodded.

    “So she gave up the right to vote here, to live in a land where women were not able to vote until the 1970s, and in some cantons, the 1980s. Right”

    Silence at the table.

    I patted his hand. “Hans, I like you. But I would never dream of traveling to Zurich, taking Swiss money, and saying these things at lunch to Swiss citizens.”

    I guess I didn’t win a lot of friends that day. It was more about being civil when visiting a foreign nation, but it was uncomfortable; Hans was and is a nice guy. Still, I’m not sorry I said it all.

    Simon Jester (3a06ee)

  15. In the summer of 1971 I camped in the Lauterbrunnen valley. The campground was where they filmed the winter race scene in the 007 movie “of her Majesty’s Secret Service”. In the ski scene where James Bond got buried in a snowdrift a St. Bernard with a little keg of whisky came to his rescue. That dog belonged to the man who owned the land where I camped (where the race took place. I have a picture of my three year old son and that St. Bernard. I enjoyed Switzerland and that valley was one of the most beautiful places I have ever visited. Good memories.

    GoneWithTheWind (d5b6e9)

  16. Being a chocoholic, The country does chocolate justice.

    mg (31009b)

  17. 14. And I thought me and sicko were impolitic.

    gary gulrud (dd7d4e)

  18. I hope you saw the waterfall inside the mountain (Trummelbach) in that valley, and that you got to go up the Schilthorn! That area is one of my favorite places on Earth.

    I love the story in comment #15. Europeans are so used to bashing America that they don’t see the log in their own eye. In 1972 while in high school I was on a choir trip to Germany. In a conversation with the teenage son of my host family, he proceeded to tell me how awful America was because of what we had done to the American Indians. My response was that most of what he was talking about had occurred a hundred years ago, and gosh, what about what happened in his own country less than 30 years ago? He was absolutely dumbfounded, and admitted sheepishly that the comparison had never occurred to him!

    There are none so blind as those who will not see…

    Sparrow (5c5d09)

  19. Did you see Heidi?

    Ken in Camarillo (2c0dee)

  20. Comment by Simon Jester (3a06ee) — 8/31/2013 @ 12:09 pm

    Everyone can stumble into an episode of “Ugly Americanism” once in a while, no matter where they are from.
    When it happens they need to be reminded of who, and what they are.
    Well Done!

    askeptic (2bb434)

  21. “Death Before Dismount!”

    Yeah, that didn’t work out too well for Custer.

    askeptic (2bb434)

  22. Way to go Simon.

    mg (31009b)

  23. I do agree it is sad what the immigrants “did” to the American Indain. Almost but not quite as bad as what the American Indians did to the immigrants. The Indians did things you can’t even include in material to be read by people under age 18. But the bottom line is the Indians killed about as many immigrants as immigrants killed Indians.

    GoneWithTheWind (d5b6e9)


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