We Climbed A Mountain

No, the title of this post is not a metaphor. We literally climbed a mountain.


We decided to spend a beautiful spring day in the canton of Appenzell and do a hike I had read lots about. You can take a cable car to the summit of a mountain called Ebenalp and hike around on top of the summit. Then, you can either walk down or take the cable car. Sounds doable right? Well-we travelled 3 hours by train, only to find out the Ebenalp cable car was closed. (Did it say that on the website??? Noooooooooooo.) Fabio and I looked at the mountain a few times and figured, hey, it can't be that bad, let's hike up it. The first part was pretty grueling. But we knew it would level out, and it did. But then-it really started going steep uphill. We kept thinking, Oh, we're almost there. "We can't turn back now that we've come this far."

We were overly ambitious and just plain stupid. Long story short, we made it to the top of Ebenalp in 2 hours, but by that time we were too exhausted to hike around up there. We thought we would try going down the mountain on a different path, which at first was great because we found a cliffside chalet, the famed "Wildkirchli" (Little Wild Church) on the cliffside, along with a cliffside guesthouse. Very unique and charming. However, these cliffside buildings were about an 1/4 of the way down the mountain, and then we found out that the path we were on was closed just beyond the guesthouse, so we had to go all the way back up to the summit and take the same path we'd just come from, down again.

I won't lie, I shed tears. My quads were already screaming, and the thought of having to go down the steep incline we'd just killed ourselves to climb up was pretty intimidating. My legs were shaking the whole way down. Fabio and I wanted to kiss the ground the moment it flattened out. Bottom line, BEAUTIFUL hike. Too bad we were huffing and puffing and too busy looking at the path in front of us to enjoy it all that much.

Verrrrrry unsuspecting Fabio before beginning our trek.


Fabio is trying to call la mamma to tell her how beautiful it was. Still very unsuspecting, as we thought we had just finished the hard part, but little did we know...


Do you see the mountain looming behind our heads? That is Ebenalp. What were we thinking?!


Climbing the summit.


We were trying to look happy the FIRST time we made it to the summit. It was not easy.


We found this little treasure on our way down the first time. I'm glad we didn't know we'd have to backtrack to the summit at this point. We thoroughly enjoyed seeing these:


Wildkirchli.




Cave chapel with alter.




The Äscher Guesthouse. Had we been super ambitious backpackers, we could have stayed the night here. I'm glad we didn't.

(P.S. Rick Steves stayed here.)

We were almost on flat ground again at this point. This was after I had sufficient time to relax after my breakdown. I was finally in the mood to take pictures again.


Don't you love how our footpath was about wind through the field of flowers? We did. I think knowing that the train station was a matter of minutes away helped us appreciate this simple observation.


We learned a very important lesson this weekend: We are not meant to be mountain climbers. We'll take a flat, scenic walk anyday though.