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...

Two times ago on Saentis, I managed to get my boot jammed in between a couple rocks and, in the process of removing it, tore right through the fabric. Eh, they weren’t really waterproof anyways and were already causing me issues. I coughed up a painful amount for proper hiking boots and, after a couple weeks of wearing them around town, took them out to Federispitz for a test run. Read more...

I watched I Am Legend a few years after it came out and was thoroughly whelmed; quasi-intelligent zombies, a lone survivor, and not much else to write home about. I remember people complaining about the I Am Legend movie being nothing like the book, and last year, I finally read it. If I had removed the titles, I never would have guessed that they were supposed to be the same thing. Read more...

Someone I did this hike with in October of 2021 reached out to me about doing Saentis again; they had never hiked before at the time, and so had to take the cable-car down from the summit. This time, we did the full loop, starting at Wasserauen and hiking up to Ebenalp, then to Saentis, and finally back down the other side of the bowl to Wasserauen. It took about 10h30min, which is still quite a bit less than the estimates on the signs. Read more...

I had some Endgame-level convergence of family the last week, and decided to take the group to one of the most stereotypically pictureque parts of Switzerland: the Bernese Oberland/Lauterbrunnen valley. Our original plan was to hike the Eiger trail, then the Mountain View Trail from Lauterbrunnen to Murren and spend the first night there, then hike to the Gspalthornhuette the second day, then the Blueemlisalphuette the third, and finally down to Oeschinensee on the last. Read more...

This past weekend, my partner and I went down to Zermatt for a weekend in the mountains. Day one, we hiked from town to the Berggasthaus Trift, a very cute little hotel nestled in a valley above Zermatt. From there, we went a good chunk of the way to the Rothornhuette before coming back down for supper. The next day, we hiked up to the Platthorn, then futzed around on the glacier between that and the Mettelhorn before returning to the hotel. Read more...

Oof, busy few days. Some family visited, so I gave them a tour of a few places, all of which I’ve done at one point or another, and know are pretty cute. Saentis Not much to say. The knife-shaped mountains are cool, and the route is a nice balance of relatively flat sections and steeper, cable guided ones. Instead of hiking from Wasserauen to Ebenalp, we took the cable car up, then hiked to Saentis proper. Read more...

I’ve come to realize that putting all my hikes in a single doc is pretty inefficient in terms of tracking and updating, so I’ve added a new tag for hikes, and each will get their own post. The old post will stay for posteriority, but won’t be updated. I may go back and retroactively make each hike it’s own post (with the appropriate dates on them, of course). Anyhoo. This hike was super chill, three hours up, two down, nothing too aggressive or technical. Read more...