Day 8: Gruben – Augstbordpass- Jungen – St Niklaus - Gasenried
Another picture perfect morning. Perhaps Brian and I had paid our dues with bad somewhat bad weather on previous trips – afterall, the weather backpacking Torres Del Paine in Chile was near horrendous and we had a few rainy days in New Zealand as well. I couldn’t be more thankful for our fabulous luck.
Augstbordpass would be our last pass of the entire hike. It was bittersweet reaching the top. I would have loved to hike for weeks on end in the Alps, but at the same time, I was really beginning to miss Adeline and our life at home. But we only had two days of hiking left, the Europa trail no less and a highly anticipated view of the Matterhorn, and I was going to make the most of it.
We descended Augstbordpass and soon came to Jungen. This was one of the coolest villages I have ever seen. It was a small German village perched right on a cliff, with no roads leading up to the town whatsoever. The only way to get off the mountain and into a “real” town was either to hike two hours down, or take the cable car. Can you imagine? What if the cable car was broken for a day and there was a medical emergency or something? It was quite amazing.
At this point, I was completely sold on riding the cable car down into Niklaus, and so was Brian. We could hike up all day, but going down was quite hard on the feet and knees. We discovered that the next cable car left at 2pm, but only because an English gentleman told us. So we had about an hour to waste, and I gladly took off my pack and laid on the grassy cliff overlooking Niklaus. However, my thoughts of greasy McDonald’s double cheeseburgers were rudely interrupted when Brian yelled at me to wake up and grab my pack, because the cable car was about to leave.
Down in Niklaus, we wandered around the small town for a bit, took off our packs, and bought a coke light. We still had to get to Gasenried that day. It was either a 1-2 hour walk or…we could take the bus. So out of curiosity we just couldn’t shake, we checked the bus schedule and prices. $7 Euro/person and leaving in 30 min? SOLD! I was over today. I thought maybe I would regret the bus decision, but let me tell you, we did the right thing. Because there was no path to Gasenried, we would have been walking along the road with the cars and buses. Ugg. How do we know this? Because we saw Jeremy walking along the road as our bus sailed passed him.
In Gasenried we found a nice bed and breakfast for the night and wait for it…we had our OWN ROOM! It was a glorious moment. We dropped our packs and went into town. I loved Gasenried. Still a quaint Swiss town, but also somewhat civilized at the same time. Around this time, I was getting very anxious about Adeline, as we hadn’t been able to check in with Mimi since the day we arrived in Geneva. So we found an internet café and found that my mom had sent us several pictures. Our little girl already looked so much bigger than when we left her! It was great to see that they were doing well. While I was checking email, Brian saw Jeremy walk by out the window and ran out to tell him where we were staying for the night. We decided to meet up for dinner in a couple hours.
That night we all dined at a pizza joint in town. Jeremy told us about his horrendous walk from Niklaus to Gasenried – I was so glad we decided against that. Conversation was good – predictably it was mostly about Jeremy’s fears of hiking the Europa Hut route, with all it's via ferrata, and for the millionth time I tried to tell him to get over it. After all, it can't be any worse than the ladders! After dinner we decided to reconvene at breakfast and then head out to the Europa Hut!
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