This is a rock I was recently stuck on top of. The picture was taken from across a small ravine-y thing on top of a mountain. It's about 15 or twenty feet high.
When I was home before coming to Switzerland, my parents and I had a discussion about our fears and we decided that I was not afraid of anything. This is not true. I am afraid heights, and I am afraid of spiders.
The mountains here are fairly deceptive. They seem friendly and inviting. Just about every road I walk down is marked with that familiar yellow diamond with the little walking-guy on it. Every road is a hiking trail. So, Laura and I decided to hike up to an old castle on a hill. My first castle ascent! We headed up the road and ducked under a fence and through a cow pasture. The path was sweet and narrow and uphill, lined with ferns and pokey-brambley like plants. The flora around here is very similar to western Washington's assemblage. Ferny things, deciduous trees and evergreens, ivy, mossy things...There are more cliffs here though.
We got to the end of the path, and there was the castle. I think it's called Chateux Vorburg. There was a railing to keep people from falling over the cliff and a splendid view of the valley below and the mountain beyond. Unfortunately we weren't close enough to actually touch the castle. I've decided that if I can't touch the ruins, it doesn't count for my collection. We passed a very steep trail on our way up, so we decided to double back and take that.
The trail started out steep but manageable. Off to our left I spied a tiny gap in the trees. I decided this was clearly the right trail because it was nearly vertical and if we were going to hike to the castle the way would be straight up. We scrambled up the hill. We were near the top when I stopped to catch my breath on a fallen log. I saw something move near my hand which was in the leaf litter and so I leaned in...and saw HUNDREDS OF SPIDERS. Not just one big spider, not two big spiders but many, many spiders all scurrying around. Because we were in a precarious area there was no safe way to get out of there fast. I was surrounded by spiders, basically on a thinly wooded cliff. I looked around, saw a rock that looked sturdy and scurried up to the top.
On the top, we noticed that we weren't any where near the castle. In fact, we were on a narrow rocky ridge and the castle was at the bottom of the 15 foot rock we were on top of. Luckily all we had to do was climb up about 6 feet of rock and then we were able to cross through a narrow gap and swing down the other side.
When we were up on that ridge, I was pretty sure we'd never get down, because it would probably involve more spiders or cliffs hidden by brushy things. We were pretty lucky to find the little gap in the rocks that we did and I've definitely learned my lesson about trails that aren't.
This is Laura on top of the ridge, after we survived the encounter with the nest of spiders. She's very happy because we didn't fall off the cliff on the way up. She's smiling because we hadn't yet realized that there was another large drop separating us from the castle.
That white pillar thing is the castle, viewed from where we first came to the top of the ridge. It looks small because we were actually fairly far away from it still at that point. The castle was about 40 feet high.
After we survived the castle ascent, we hiked the other direction along the ridge, and came to another cliff. We were looking for a large painting--the canton's flag is painted on a cliff above town. When we got down from there (safely, on well marked, wide trails) we realized that we were sitting right above the painting. I wish I had been able to get a good picture of where we were sitting. We could have hung our legs over the edge of the cliff--it was a drop off, a rock ledge..I've never seen anything like it. We ate chocolate up there and were very nervous.
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