I’m heading home for the holidays in a week and a bit, and wanted to get a last hike or two in. I really enjoyed the route up the Chaiserstock and decided I’d give it a shot, and readjust my plans if necessary if conditions aren’t ideal. Well, I didn’t expect nearly a meter of snow dumped on the mountainside. The regular route past the local via ferrata was impassable, 40+ degree slopes with shear drops and lots of powder snow. Read more...

I decided to do this hike again with better weather, with much more success. The route up through the pass to the summit was pre-post-holed by other hikers, making it much easier going than before. There was a bit more exposure than I was necessarily comfortable with one point, but that section was thankfully quite short before opening to a nice flat field before the summit. The view from the top was spectacular, with views of Pilatus, Grosser and Kleiner Mythen, Gross Aubrig, and Chaeserrugg (and a billion other peaks I don’t know the name of and will have to get around to hiking eventually). Read more...

After over a week of not really doing any exercise, gym or hiking, I figured it was time to crank out a quick hike. Since the weather was supposed to be bad (a few mm of snow at lower altitudes), I figured I’d do a shorter, safer hike, and picked Bockmattli thanks to its sub-30 degree incline for most of the ascent, lower altitude, and proximity to another hike I had previously done but never gotten a good look from afar, Gross Aubrig. Read more...

I haven’t been able to update the gemini version of this blog for the past few months because of some bug causing new posts to not be added to the index.gmi file. I probably should have looked into it sooner, because it turns out all I needed to do was add type: post to the header of my .md source files. Turns out the newer version of Hugo I’ve been using doesn’t do it by default, and I never noticed it was missing. Read more...

I intended to do this last Sunday, but ended up only sleeping three hours and figured it wasn’t worth trying on so little sleep, so I did it yesteray instead. It really was unfortunate, since on Sunday the grass was green on the south side and the sun was out, but by yesterday, a bunch of snow had been dumped on the mountain. I ended up making it within 15 minutes of the summit, but had to turn back due to some snow drifts covering up the switchbacks, with a nice steep drop on the side if I happened to slip or the snow shifted. Read more...

I went for a hike with my roommates yesterday (for the first time since moving here, took a little while) to Gross Aubrig, on the basis of 1. it being near Zurich and 2. it being a shorter hike, so more suitable for busy students. The hike itself was nice, as was the companionship. Something I’ve come to appreciate across hikes is being able to drawing connections between regions of the country via peaks. Read more...

A gene variation that occurs to a hatched proto-chicken, if not occuring in the sperm or eggs, will not be passed on to the animal’s offspring, meaning it could not possibly be the first chicken since the gene variation would die with it. If the gene variation occurs in the sperm or egg, or in their early union, then the offspring (first in the form of an egg, then that of a chicken) will inherit (and be able to pass on) that gene variation. Read more...

I have an irrational fear of becoming labelled or labelling myself. I don’t follow a sports team or preferred brand. I don’t consider myself a conservative or a liberal or a green; I vote for a party each election independantly based solely on their platform, not their title. I’m not a metalhead or a kpop stan or a classical affeccionado; I just listen to whatever music I find interesting at the time, regardless of genre. Read more...

I’ve written two articles with things on the internet I’ve found worth sharing; this is the third entry, coming in ten months after the second, which itself came five months after the first. Despite the time gap being twice as large, the list certainly isn’t; I suspect this has to do with my slow decline into giving up and increase in vapid social media usage. While I have a draft on the topic written up, I suspect it’ll be relegated to my diary instead, since I’m fairly afraid of the reaction it would garner from the few, if any, people who read this. Read more...

Seeing this mountain from Saentis a few times, I figured it was finally time to give it a shot. I took a van (small town public transit can be strange sometimes) from Walenstadt partway up the hill to Walenstadt, Stauffacher. From there, it was two hours of straight uphill through first trees, then steep hills to the summit. The view from the top was pretty spectacular, offering an unobstructed view of the Alpstein massif to the north and whatever mountains are in every other direction. Read more...