Łukasz and Afroz contacted me about hiking on the weekend. The weather situation was still somewhat tricky, with fresh snow starting from as low as 1900 meters. And there was a chance of more rain on the intended day of the outing. Thus we decided to play it safe and aimed for a modest hike at low altitude. It turned out to be an extremely lucky choice!
The Simmental is wild, romantic and rural. Clocks tick slower there. When we parked the car in the morning we felt like the only humans around. Sleepy farms in the mist of low hanging clouds. Peaceful and serene atmosphere. Which we spoiled by conjuring up Texas chain saw massacre horror movie scenaries of a bunch of clueless city dwelling hikers getting lured into a cannibal farm and butchered.
Our "planning" for this hike consisted of me eye balling the map on my phone the night before and deciding for a spot that none of us knew yet which should also work from a weather point of view. My expectaction was that we'd spent quite some time on farm roads. And while this was true for a tiny stretch of the way, mostly we had beautiful trails under our feet.
We reached the "summit" without any issue. For this particular mountain, it is actually a large plateau used for grazing cows. Not trivial to figure out where the highest point even is ;-P It was in the foggy half-light of the clouds on the summit that we met the only other person that day. A guy sitting alone, waiting for the views to clear up.
After traversing the ridge all the way towards the minor neighboring peak, we made our way down to close the loop back to the car. Łukasz made a spontaneous great call by picking a trail that turned out to be mostly overgrown and clearly saw very little use. At the same time it led straight to where we wanted to be and offered great vistas and walking. Lucky choice!
I'm currently taking a sabbatical for the summer (Motto: Less mental exhaustion, more physical exhaustion!). Łukasz and Afroz of course are colleagues from work. So while we had a ton of great conversations along the way, they also updated me on the goings on at the office (at my request!). A bittersweet experience to hear about things with no agency to do anything about them.
17.7km, 1033m, 4:51h
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