Kistenpass Read online

  Finally I intercepted the trail. It made a decent contour across the slope, as expected, and I did as planned and ran along it to escape the fly zone. But there proved to be a number of little pastures to pass through, and the flies pursued me for a long time, because the little pastures all sported summer barns that were as dirty as any buildings I had ever seen in Switzerland. The Disney spotlessness of the tourist zone and the German Swiss cantons generally had here given way to a grubby working landscape, hot and glary and dusty and flyblown. It looked like a ranch in Nevada.

  I turned to look south and remind myself where I was. During the ice ages the Alps were covered by much thicker and longer-lasting glaciers than California’s Sierra Nevada, and as a result the Alps’ valleys are much steeper and deeper. The high lake-filled basins that characterize the Sierras are extremely rare in the Alps, because they were ground away, leaving only the famous horns, knife-edge ridges, steep green walls, and immense gulfs of air. Looking over the five thousand-foot drop of the Vorderrhein toward Italy, I thought I could see the curvature of the Earth. Well okay maybe it wasn’t Nevada.

  Turning back to my hike, I ascended a rocky hill and felt as if I were finally getting down to business. It was about one in the afternoon. The trail now began switchbacking, up toward a notch in the ridge above. Granite broke out of the grass, in forms big and small: sand, scree, talus, boulders, bedrock. Soon there was more rock than grass, and the little meadows that remained were filled with the full array of Swiss wildflowers, including moss campion, which is like a pincushion of dark moss stuck by a circle of tiny pink flowers. Moss campion and blue cornflowers were my favorites, and there were lots of both scattered over the dark orange granite, fine-grained and handsome. Yes, I was finally getting up into the god zone.

  Soon I was through the notch on the ridge, and crossing a small tilted granite bowl above it, where the rock was half covered with snow. Trail signs pointed to the upper rim of this bowl, called the Cavorgia da Breil. The low point of the rim was Kistenpass itself. The pass!

  I tromped happily up old snow to the ridge, and was soon in the pass. Up there I discovered, as one often does, that the landscape on the other side of the pass was very different from what I had seen so far. I was looking north along the western side of a long steep ridge, called the Muttenbergen, which ran to a peak called the Muttenstock, then dipped and continued up again to a peak called the Ruchi. The west side of the Muttenbergen dropped very steeply into a lake called the Limmerensee-1200 vertical meters in less than a kilometer horizontally. The steepness was not continuous, happily, but rather a matter of two cliffs, high and low, separated by a band about the steepness of a church roof, still covered with snow. This snowy stretch was called the Kistenband, and my way forward ran over it. The pitch looked a bit uncomfortable, but given the cliffs above and below, there was no other way forward. Unfortunately the trail lay under the snow.

  Well, a line of bootprints in the snow showed me where the trail no doubt ran. I took off and followed them. The Kistenband: it was a good name. I was no longer surprised that a feature like this had a name;. I had learned that the association of the Swiss with their Alps had gone on so long that were names for practically everything you could name, right down to individual boulders. Цtzi the Alpine Man could have named this band five thousand years ago.

  The line of bootprints in the snow ran a little closer to the lower edge of the Kistenband than I would have liked, but the untrodden snow above it was much slippier, so there was no good alternative to following the tracks. The bootprints were only semi-frozen at this point in the day, both slick underfoot and with a tendency to collapse down and to the left. Where the Kistenband ended the cliff fell away so steeply that I could see not see anything of the lake below, but only knew it was there because of my map, which showed it was a long narrow reservoir, a thousand meters lower. Knowledge of this drop was making the Kistenband begin to seem a little too steep. The bootprints got softer by the minute, and with every step I slid a little down and to the left. Walking poles would have been great, an ice axe even better, but I had not expected snow. It was August 12 th, and I was only at 2700 meters on a west-facing slope, and in the Sierras. . . well, I had already learned the Alps were not the Sierras. Now I was learning it again. All I could do was go slow, and pay really close attention to my footing, staring at the snow under me until my pupils had contracted to pinpricks. Whenever I paused to look up the world had the dim look of a photo negative. The sky looked dark, even the snow itself looked dark.

  This went on for what seemed like a long time, but in fact the Kistenband is only about a kilometer long, and my traverse probably took no more than half an hour. But it’s a big world at times like that. Every time I slipped chunks of ice clattered down to the left and disappeared over the cliff, and while it seemed likely I would be able to drag myself to a halt if I fell and slipped myself, it wasn’t the kind of theory you want to give a practical test.

  So when I came to the widening at the north end of the Kistenband, where the slope lessens, I stopped and took a breather. There was a spur just below me to my left, jutting out over the Limmerensee, and to my surprise a little roof top poked out over the last rock. I walked over and found a tiny shed tucked under the spur. Possibly an emergency hut; but its door was locked, and there were no signs on it. Maybe it was a storage shed for cowherds, or trail crews. In any case there it was. The top of the spur above it was clear of snow, and had a magnificent view; and I was past the crux of the hike, and suddenly hungry. I sat down to eat my lunch, feet kicking over the edge of the rock.

  Checking out the next section of my hike, behind me and to my right, I could see that the ridge of the Muttenbergen curled like the top of a question mark, arcing from the Muttenstock to a peak called the Ruchi to another called the Rüchi. Tucked in the curve of the question mark was a snowy basin called the Mutten, filled for the most part by an icy lake called the Muttsee. I could see the trail as a line of bootprints running across the snow covering the rib that held the Muttsee in place, and there on the rib stood a little square dot, black in the piebald mix of snow and rock. My map identified this building as the Muttseehutte, SAC (Swiss Alpine Club). When I got there it would be caffe fertig time for sure.

  Under my feet the space over the Limmerensee looked like an enormous roofless room, long and narrow, with the lake as its blue carpet. The wall on the other side of the lake was a horizontally banded cliff, rising sheer from the water to my own height; above that it broke up and lay back in a wild jumble of snow and boulders, ending in a jagged skyline that ran from peak to peak-from the Vorder Selbsanft to the Selbsanft to the Hinter Selbsanft to the Vord Schiben to the Hinter Schiben. All these names made sense in relation to my vantage point, as if they had been named from there.

  The Muttsee and the Limmerensee were both blue, but the blues were very different. The Muttsee was the brilliant turquoise of water lying over submerged ice, under a clear sky. The Limmerensee, on the other hand, was a reservoir, and its catchment basin included two hanging glaciers that added glacial milk to the clearer waters coming in from elsewhere. The resulting mix was the opaque virulent blue of radiator antifreeze.

  The reservoir flooded a valley which must have been quite something before it was drowned. The mapmakers had retained the contour lines of the submerged area, turning them blue rather than the usual brown, and these showed what had probably been meadow or forest, or a mix of the two, with the Limmerenbach running down the middle. It might have looked like Yosemite; but this had not stopped the Swiss from damming it. In their drive for electricity they had dammed and drowned many of the deepest gorges in the Swiss Alps. I suppose you can’t afford to regard sixty-five percent of your country as an untouchable wilderness, but I was still a little shocked whenever I saw how relentlessly they have altered their landscape. We’ve done a lot of it in the Sierra too, but nothing compared to them. No doubt a hidden valley like this one never had a chance.

  And
yet it was still a great space; and the Muttsee at least was still beautiful. I pulled my bahnhof sandwich from my daypack, pleased with my lunchtime prospect.

  As I began eating I heard a buzz from below, and spotted a helicopter the size of a mosquito, floating just over the antifreeze. It rose in slow spirals, working hard to gain altitude. No doubt it was climbing to resupply the Muttseehutte: I had been at other SAC huts when helicopters flew in with supplies. It was going to be interesting to watch it from this distance.

  The helicopter rose in an expanding spiral that used the entire space of the gorge. It took at least ten minutes for it to ascend, giving me a sudden new sense of just how deep the gorge was. It’s hard to see vertical distance; the eye has a predilection to see all great heights as about a thousand feet, a foreshortening error that does not go away even when you know about it. Now the helicopter’s long struggle was making the real height of the gorge evident.

  Eventually it completed its climb and banked in a final spiral that brought it under my part of the cliff. I was going to get a good view of it as it passed me by. I sat on my overlook and observed its two circles of blurred blades, big one horizontal, small one vertical. They are strange machines. The engine noise, which had started as a mosquito buzz, was now a roar. It was really going to pass close to me.

  Then it rose to my level and hung right before me, making an incredible racket. It turned toward me, and I found myself looking into its bubble windshield, eye-to-eye with the pilot. He was a black man, wearing mirrored sunglasses and big earphones. I thought he looked American, and waved at him, but his hands were busy and he didn’t wave back. I saw his forearms shift on his controls, and the helicopter tilted forward and began to drift straight in at me.

  “Whoah!” I said. What the hell? The helo was still closing, the pilot’s face was still blank. I scrambled to my feet, turned and retreated quickly onto the spur’s flat top. I looked over my shoulder to be sure all was well and was astonished to see the helicopter was topping the spur and turning down toward me, louder than ever.

  I bolted up the hill in a panic. The blast of its wind buffeted my back, and in the horrible roar I dared a look over my shoulder, terrified of what I would see—

  It was landing on the flat spot behind the spur.

  I stopped running. All was suddenly clear: I had been sitting on the edge of his landing pad. It was the only flat spot around. He was bringing supplies to the little locked shed under the spur.

  Well of course! I had not fallen into a horror movie after all! I should have been able to figure it out earlier.

  I stood there feeling my heart blast the blood through me. All my capillaries throbbed at every hit, and my vision was bouncing.

  The pilot killed the engine and climbed out of the cockpit. I walked back down the hill toward him, anxious to apologize for taking so long to figure out what was happening

  He saw me and said something before bending to his cargo door, but there was still lot of noise and I couldn’t hear him. I came a little closer to yell that I didn’t speak much German, and all of a sudden he straightened up and shouted, “ACHTUNG!”

  I stopped in my tracks. He pointed up at the blades still thwacking the air overhead. In that instant I saw that as rotor blades slow down they become visible from the inside out. What I had assumed were the ends of the blades were actually just the ends of their visible part. Looking more closely I saw the faint blur of sky that marked their real ends; the blades were about twice as long as I had thought they were. Not only that, but as they slowed they were beginning to droop, and I was descending onto the flat from the slope above. So the actual tips of the blades, now quite visible to me, were at my head level, and about fifteen feet away.

  I turned and walked off. The pilot was busy anyway, and I had lost all interest in talking to him. I got out of there.

  Several minutes down the trail I noticed that my half-eaten sandwich was still in my hand, squished into a ribbed tube of dough. I nibbled it as I hiked, and realized after a while that I was too deaf to hear myself chew. I looked back once or twice without intending to. I came to some of the deepest suncups I had ever seen, skidded this way and that on snow that had lost all structural integrity. It didn’t matter; I wasn’t there anyway.

  When I trudged up the final approach to the Muttseehutte I was really ready to sit down and have a caffee fertig or two, or three. After that I would continue over a nearby rise called the Muttenchopf, and descend to the cable car that would drop me to the road at Tierfed.

  The hut keeper was standing on the porch outside his door. He greeted me as I approached: “Grüüüüt-zi!” It was the Swiss greeting at its most Swiss.

  He was short and bald, barrel-chested and suntanned, with immense forearms. He asked me where I had come from and I told him, re-entering that zone of competence in German that I had magically occupied during my time with Mario. The hut keeper asked questions about snow conditions on the south side of the pass, and I described what I had seen, and it was all as clear as could be. I did not attempt to tell him about my encounter with the helicopter, which was beyond my German to express, and so the conversation proceeded well. At one point, enjoying my ability to do it, I asked him how long it would take me to hike over the Muttenchopf, and when the last cable car of the day left Galbchopf for Tierfed.

  The question startled him: Why? he asked. Did I want to take it?

  Exactly, I said. I did want to take it.

  He walked across the porch to me and said very firmly, “Du muss schon gegangen sein!”

  You must already gegone to be.

  I thought it over; yes, that was what it meant; most of the words were utterly simple, and I knew very well that “schon” meant “already,” because that was what I used to yell at my Swiss baseball teammates when they did something good, meaning to yell “schцn” like they did, a mistake that had given them no end of amusement before they had finally corrected me. So:

  You must already be gone!

  “Whoah!” I said. The hut keeper nodded as he saw I understood, just as the train conductor had that morning. He took me by the arm and walked me down to a trail sign just below the hut. In rapid but still magically comprehensible German he told me that the trail that went down to the dam, and then through a tunnel to the cable car station, was a much faster route than the trail over the Muttenchopf-so much faster that it was my only hope of catching the last car, which left at 3:45.

  It was now 3:05. I got out my topo map and he nodded approvingly and traced with a thick finger the trail I should take. “Fiertzig minuten,” he said emphatically. Forty minutes. And then he stepped back and cried, “Fliegst du!”

  FLY YOU! Yikes! No more than five minutes had passed since my arrival, and here I was waving good-bye to the hut keeper and running down the trail, over the lip of the Mutten and down a steep green bowl to the shore of the virulent Limmerensee.

  The trail was snow-free, and dropped down gullies and over grassy humps, and most of the time I could run it. Where the trail banked against rock walls there were cable handrails bolted into the rock, and these helped me maintain a good speed even when things got quite steep.

  After about ten minutes of this I paused to catch my breath and eat my Toblerone bar, and look again at my map. As soon as I calculated the altitudes and distances involved I took off again, running down the trail faster than ever. Forty minutes! He was crazy! The drop to the lake was six hundred and fifty vertical meters, and the tunnel looked to be about three kilometers long! No way!

  But way. He had said it was possible, and he wouldn’t have said it if he hadn’t been sure. He had done it. Those Swiss Army guys passing me by in their car could do it, each chased by his own personal Bццgen perhaps, but they could. If they couldn’t the hut keeper would have told me to forget it, that I should stay the night at his hut,where there would be a radio phone that I could have used tell Lisa what had happened. Then I could have relaxed on the hut’s porch drinking caffee fertig,,
or just the fertig (cognac), while watching the evening alpenglow light up the Muttenstock. That was a good idea, now that I thought of it, but instead here I was hauling ass down the trail like a Keystone Kop, cursing the Swiss with every leap. Have a nice day in the Alps, I shouted as I plunged. So relaxing! God damn you guys! God damn your cable cars, and God damn you for closing the fucking things eight hours before dark! When you bother to keep them open at all! It was ridiculous! But I was going to do it anyway, and without any Bццgens to chase me either-just a determination to get home that night, and because the hut keeper had said I could do it.

  So I descended 650 meters in twenty-five minutes, certainly my all-time record (at least until I cut my shin on the Black Giant, but that’s another story). I panted along the shores of the radioactive Limmerensee until I was stopped by a cliff that dropped straight into the water. The trail ran right under a black iron door in the cliff.

  The tunnel. God damn it one more time. I don’t like tunnels. I approached the door and looked at a page taped to it. The printed message, in German of course, had words so long they crossed the whole page. I couldn’t understand any of it. Apparently my streak of German had ended in the great exchange with the hut keeper. Fly you! I had flown.

  I turned the handle and pulled the door open. There was a light button just inside the door, and when I pushed it a line of bare bulbs came on overhead, illuminating a tunnel about nine feet high and not much wider. There were metal tracks, like tram tracks, laid on the tunnel’s stone floor.