Brrrrr

We stayed last night in Zinal, which seemed to be the biggest village since Chamonix so far. That means we had a choice of restaurants last night (we picked a good one) and a grocery store to find some lunch food for today. Tami was even able to augment her wardrobe for the cooler weather. The hotel had a hot tub and sauna but I'm not sure they would have welcomed us in either our underwear or our birthday suits. Great breakfast this morning too....

Zinal is in a narrow valley so we started climbing right away. It was a pretty cloudy day but we still had good views back down to Zinal (see first photo below). This photo was taken about 350m above our starting point. In total today we would climb 1250m and go down 1090m. The climb was about 500m of steep, followed by 250m of gentle, followed by 500m of steep to the Forcletta pass. The downhill all came after the pass and was a good grade on the knees. We encountered lots of grazing cattle today, many right on our path. Thankfully they just looked at us and mooed a little. The more unpleasant issue for us was the mess they make of the trail - both just chewing it up as they walk along it and the fact that they seem to think it's there for them to fill with cow patties. We were first on the trail this morning so we entertained ourselves for a while watching others negotiate a path through the critters. We had snow drizzle on-and-off all day. As we approached the pass the wind picked up as well, making for a chilly ascent. It was still shorts and t-shirt weather for me on the way up, but I covered up to go down the other side. The views opened up a bit on the way down and we were able to see a few big mountains and glaciers in our new valley (Turtmanntal).

Tonight's hotel seems to be the only one in town - The Schwarzhorn. Seems to be a nice place. And thankfully they speak English since this is our first night in the German speaking part of Switzerland. The Rossland 6 and the Seattle family of 11 are here so there are some familiar faces.