back from a fantastic day at glaubenberg. fantastic and also a bit unexpected. we took the 8:15 train from adliswil to zürich this morning, then went to lucerne and changed into the brünig pass train but only as far as sarnen. the weather was fantastic: blue skies and mild.

at sarnen we were not the only ones: quite a number of snow shoe walkers, just plain walkers, and ski tourers were going up to langis by post bus as well! while we were stuffing our gear into the bus’s luggage compartment, the post bus driver of the melchsee-frutt bus drops the remark that the melchsee-frutt ski area was already overcrowded!

after another post horn ride (if the roads are narrow and winding enough, the swiss post bus drivers are sounding their post bus horn, nice sound that) we get to langis. the snow cover looks so-so — enough to start the snow shoe trail, though.

basically, the snow show trail follows the summer trail to jänzi: at first along a meandering creek, then, after about 2km we leave the creek and start the ascent. we are on the western side of the mountain range which jänzi is part of and the the trail leads us through a forest — which means that the snow is still more or less “snow shoeable” and we enjoy the winding snow shoe trail up the mountain.

once up at jänzi there’s a fantastic view across the swiss alps! after a brief break we continue on our trail — which only works out for about 500m: the snow very quickly turns into slush and all of a sudden is no longer with us…it’s like we’ve stepped from winter into summer just by traversing 50m of mountain slope: it’s sunny, quite warm (nice), at a nearby alp walkers are sunbathing. in view of the hopeless situation (it doesn’t really look like we are going to have a severe snow storm bring 1m of snow within the next 10min — actually, it doesn’t look like it’s ever going to snow again this side of the summer solstice, coming to think of it), we alter our plans slightly and instead of completing the circuit we descend to sarnen

as i said, a rather nice summer walk (well, with the exception of some thick trees who still deem themselves in winter)…a funny day out: starting in winter, ending in summer.