HAPPY TRAILS

            Hiking in the Bernese Swiss Alps is like champagne for your feet.  And your eyes.  And your heart.  The trails are narrow dirt paths, or paved walkways, or gravelly snaking footpaths.  A number of trails start above Murren, the tiny car-free village that nestles on an outcropping above the Lauterbrunnen Valley. To access the trails, you catch a cablecar from Murren and climb, at an almost vertical angle, up a thousand feet or so.  As the cable car slides up the mountain, we pass sweating farmers, men and women, cutting hay with odd scything tractors and raking it into swathes with long-handled wooden rakes.  It has been surprisingly hot, even up at 7,000 and 8,000 feet elevation, with temperatures hovering in the high 80s and near 90.  The sweating women rake the golden hay onto big gray tarps whose sides they gather up to form a sling.  The sling is loaded onto a trailer that’s been attached to a tractor, and the tractor heads straight downhill with its load, or climbs vertically up to the next field.  Everything seems to defy gravity:  the tractor slowly crawling up the mountain face; the women raking while their feet grip the sheer mountainside, the cable car floating through space higher and higher.

            We reach the top and disembark.  Because it’s Switzerland, there’s a lovely restaurant at the top, with outdoor seating that overlooks breathless beauty.  And because it’s Switzerland, there’s a children’s playground at the top, too.  The Swiss seem to value the mountains, hiking, excellent viewpoints, good food, and happy playing children.  Everywhere we go, whenever there is a cable car or train stop with a great view, there’s a restaurant and a play area.  Mom and Dad sip beers, the grandparents tuck into hearty platters of food, and the kids slide and swing and have a great time.  Something for everyone.

            Where the Almendhubel cable car deposits us, directly opposite the massive faces of the Eiger, Munch and Jungfrau Mountains, there’s an additional attraction by the obligatory restaurant-play area combo.  We see several Swiss adults and kids headed to it with relish.  Taking off their shoes, they step first into a square that is filled with big rocks.  They walk over the rocks with their bare feet, and then step down into a second square filled with smaller rocks.  Over the rocks they go, and then step into a third square filled with gravel, followed by a fourth filled with woodchips, and a fifth filled with wooden bars.  The sixth step-down is into a calf-high trough of icy cold water.  Ahhh.  Nothing spells good podiatry fun more than walking over rocks, gravel, sawdust, and wood and then wading through glacial runoff.  We watch several people line up for the experience, laughing all the way.

            Although it’s difficult to say no to the opportunity to rip the flesh off your feet on a variety of unaccommodating surfaces, I decide to keep my boots on and embark on a trail that heads off through fields filled with Alpine wildflowers.  White, purple, golden, red; from teeny star shapes to big-headed blossoms; ground cover to knee-high; singles to clumps – the flowers are every shape and color.  It’s a profusion of colors, rainbows in the grass.  And the grass itself is a shimmering green, so that it’s a verdant background starred with colors and shapes.

            Jeff and Max and I hike along, and encounter big Swiss cows.  BIG Swiss cows, their hides a soft tan.  They are all Mamas and babies but the Mamas still have horns.  They bear around their necks gigantic oversized bells that ring with every motion of their heads.  It has to drive them nuts.  Or drive them deaf.  Or both.  But it doesn’t seem to bother them.  They stand in fields along the trails and occasionally, on the trail itself, turning their big heads to watch us hike by.  One cow actually trots up to Max and stands before him, looking him in the eye, clearly waiting for something.  “What’s with this cow?” Max asks.  I’ve read that the cows liked to be petted but thought it was a joke. When I told Max, he reached out a hand and tentatively patted the cow on the forehead.  The cow moved a step closer and leaned into the caress.  Max patted her more enthusiastically and the cow definitely gave off a satisfied aura.  The cow stared after us, a bit regretfully I thought, as we moved away.

            Farms and farmhouses are sprinkled among the valleys we hike through.  The trail at times goes directly through farmyards.  I imagined the private property rights crowd in America going crazy at the thought of sharing nature with hikers.  Some of the farms have opened up little cafes: a table or two scattered on the grass beside the farmhouse.  We stop at one to get out of a high-mountain thunderstorm. We have coffee and Max has a “milkshake,” which is just a glass of milk flavored with chocolate.  Inside part of the farm complex is a cheese making operation. The farm is an old dairy, and inside sit huge wheels of cheese.  We buy a small slab.  It’s salty and mild-flavored. 

            The farms we come across are all working farms, including one from which several farm hands (kids of the farmer, it looked like, along with the farmer himself) had been dispatched to bring the herd down from the mountains for the night.  We stood on the trail and watched.  Down a nearly vertical incline, from the high mountain valley where they’d grazed all day, came a herd of cows, ambling in small groups of two or three.  Then the farmer whistled at his border collie, who snapped to attention. The farmer waved an arm at the most far-flung cow, and the dog dropped into a low, ground-hugging posture and took off like a shot, running up to the cow’s face and startling it so that it turned and joined its fellows.  The border collie trotted back to the farmer, awaiting further orders.  The farmer, impatient at the cows’ slow pace, sent out the dog again, and it went to work, nipping at the heels of the cows, circling right at their noses, hugely outsized by the cows but a dozen times more nimble on its feet than its bovine charges.  The dog got the cows into a faster walk, then a trot, then a downhill careen as the cows moved toward the barn at what can only be described as a brisk gallop.  I’ve never seen cows run before, and I’ve never watched a border collie do the work that is in its genes.  All told, the round-up took 20 minutes or so, and the cows collected at the bottom of the mountain and broke into two single-file lines, and walked slowly, one by one, into the barn to be milked.

            We smiled at the farmer appreciately, and he smiled back.  As does everyone on the trail.  On the Murren side of the Lauterbrunnen Valley, the hikers are nearly all Swiss or German.  As they approach us on the trail, they invariably look us in the eye and smile and say the Swiss version of hello, which is a regional dialect slang for the formal German “good day.”  Many times, they also say some little pleasantry that I can’t make out, but understand it to be the equivalent of, “Lovely day!” or “Wasn’t that last twist of the trail a killer!” They are friendly and open; eye contact is a must; chatting is advised. 

            On the Wengen side of the Valley where many more tour groups pass through, the hikers are more international:  Brits, French, some Italians, a few Germans and Swiss, and even a few Americans.  On this side of the valley, the trails are far more crowded.  Needless to say, I prefer the Murren side, with its more peaceful and isolated trails, and fellow hikers whose roots go down deep into the local soil.

As we go hike the trails above Murren, we see locals of all ages and in all configurations:  white-haired couples out enjoying a nice hike; families with young children; single people; and grown kids with their parents.  On a lovely, hot summer afternoon, with the sky a deep blue and the Eiger, Munch and Jungfrau mountains rearing their white-capped heads above us, the Swiss are out enjoying their land.  And so are we.