Training Log Archive: blairtrewinIn the 1 days ending Oct 31, 2015:
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Saturday Oct 31, 2015 #
8 AM
Run 1:01:00 [3] 11.0 km (5:33 / km)
From Nesslau in northeast Switzerland. Took a while to find a good way to do this but good once I did. Started out up the river valley, which for the first bit had a nice track along a flat bottom next to the water, but I know enough about pre-alpine Switzerland to know that that was unlikely to last for long, and indeed around the next corner was a (nice) waterfall with a bit of stair work. Ended up back up at the main road, and as the alternative for continuing was an unrunnable gorge crossing I decided to stick with the main road up to the next village - a bit too much traffic for comfort. Was settling nicely in a physical sense by then, though, and once in that village, found a good side track for an out-and-back, then came back on a similarly quiet path/road on the other side of the valley. Not a bad run in the end.
The main target of the day was the Santis, the highest peak in this part of Switzerland and also location of a weather station with 150 years or so of history. If you're really keen you can walk or run up this (as Lachy did last weekend), although you'd want to be better with heights than I am in the upper sections of the tracks. We were well and truly above the low cloud/fog line here, and the views were as spectacular as you would expect ('gute Fernsicht', as per the forecast, turned out to mean everything as far as the Black Forest and French Jura), though it was sobering to see that summer 2015 looks to have just about finished off the two summit glaciers. (Vanessa tells me there's still a fragment in a sheltered spot not visible from the summit).
It may be low season but there were still lots of people out, many of them walking in the foothills. The road up to the pass at the cable car base was also much used by motorcyclists (as I suspect many Swiss mountain passes are in good weather).
A couple of my long-term Australian sites (Snowtown and Palmerville) are in places better known for murder than they are for meteorology, but the Santis can go one better than this, thanks to the 1922 murder of the weather observer and his wife on the summit. The case was never solved although a prime suspect committed suicide a few weeks later.
Finished the day by joining up with Vanessa, Tobias and a few friends, and after one false start, finding a pub to watch the rugby in (I'd almost got the date of this wrong by a day).
The main target of the day was the Santis, the highest peak in this part of Switzerland and also location of a weather station with 150 years or so of history. If you're really keen you can walk or run up this (as Lachy did last weekend), although you'd want to be better with heights than I am in the upper sections of the tracks. We were well and truly above the low cloud/fog line here, and the views were as spectacular as you would expect ('gute Fernsicht', as per the forecast, turned out to mean everything as far as the Black Forest and French Jura), though it was sobering to see that summer 2015 looks to have just about finished off the two summit glaciers. (Vanessa tells me there's still a fragment in a sheltered spot not visible from the summit).
It may be low season but there were still lots of people out, many of them walking in the foothills. The road up to the pass at the cable car base was also much used by motorcyclists (as I suspect many Swiss mountain passes are in good weather).
A couple of my long-term Australian sites (Snowtown and Palmerville) are in places better known for murder than they are for meteorology, but the Santis can go one better than this, thanks to the 1922 murder of the weather observer and his wife on the summit. The case was never solved although a prime suspect committed suicide a few weeks later.
Finished the day by joining up with Vanessa, Tobias and a few friends, and after one false start, finding a pub to watch the rugby in (I'd almost got the date of this wrong by a day).