FAULHORN Hike

or: we survived 🙂 

After been working half day, I meet up with Lukas at Zürich HB at 13 for the train ride to Region Grindelwald. We realized quite fast that this was not a normal weekend in this region, due to all the people around. This was the weekend for the yearly Eiger Ultra Trail Run, a 101 km run with 6700 high difference, something insane for most “normal” people. As we didn’t know the path for the run, we decided to continue with our plan to walk up to Faulhorn during the afternoon and to raise our tent for the night. The weather was perfect with a blue sky and some beautiful white clouds. The temperature was nice and as we weren’t in a hurry we decided to start with an extra turn up to the viewpoint Daube (2076 m) before heading towards Faulhorn. The views of this fantastic hike were definitely amazing and we were both surprised how easy it felt, even with quite big backpacks. Sometimes around 17-18 we realized that the weather started to change as the clouds started to increase but as it still looked quite nice and as the forecast had promised perfect conditions, we still didn’t saw it coming…

We had a fantastic hike of about 5 hours in total and just as we discussed where to put up the tent, the sky opened and rain and hail was poring down. That made the decision easy, we put up the tent at the spot we were standing. Lukas hurried up to put up the base tent and I made sure to get our backpacks into the tent quickest possible to try to avoid them from getting totally wet. As I entered the tent my first mission was to dry up the water that already had started to create some puddles here and there.

Luckily before leaving the apartment, I spontaneous packed my survivors blanket as this was the first time for me to camp up in the mountains, and as I didn’t knew what expected us. The survivor blanket is a very thin blanked made of aluminumto keep you warm or cold in case of emergency. If I may say, using it as rain protector at the floor of the tent, kept us away from an emergency this time. If we wouldn’t have had it, we would probably have become totally wet and cold during the night and thanks to that product, we kept dry during the whole night!!!

Lukas finally entered the tent completely wet and as I was quite worried at this time that it would get dangerous, Lukas tried to calm me down by convincing me that it would only be dangerous by lightning and thunder, and like he ordered it, the next second it started to thunder. We discussed the option of hike the last part up to the SAC hut but as we would never managed before it got completely dark, we decided to stay where we were for the night. We changed to dry cloths and had some bread and meat for dinner instead of cooking our pesto pasta in our new bought outdoor kitchen, as we didn’t want to go out in the rain again.

Suddenly, still during the thunderstorm we heard a helicopter passing by our tent at a quite close distance. It was REGA and I assume they asked themselves what idiots that was camping in this bad weather. Anyhow, they flew away which made me a bit more confident that they didn’t think it was too dangerous for us to stay.

During the night Lukas got to eat up making fun of the size of my sleeping bag as we made our beds for the night. He was at first so proud of the small packing size and weight of his sleeping bag but as he was shivering like an aspen leaf during the night, he was extremely thankful for the warmth of mine. I felt sorry for him and did what I could to keep him warm.

We woke up around 7 in the morning at the sound of the helicopter that was following the leader of the run. It was actually quite cool looking out of the tent opening with a warm cup of coffee, seeing the silhouettes of the runners at the pitch. After packing out things we enjoyed brace the runners on our way down to First where we enjoyed a very tasty pasta lunch.

The hike didn’t turn out as planned this time but it’s definitelya memory for life! I’m happy that I share it with you darling,and I enjoyed (almost) every second of it!!! ❤️