Our Last Pass

Apparently the trek is winding down. We did our last pass today - Augstbordpass. The great weather appeared to return. We woke to cloudless skies, although there was frost on the ground and the air was a bit nippy. We climbed about 1000m to the pass. This was definitely our easiest climb yet - nice gentle slope for the most part, lots of open views and good footing. The valley we were leaving was still clear (first pic) but the valley after the pass had a pretty big cloud obscuring the views (second pic). We went down a few hundred metres and had lunch just above the cloud and out of the wind. Then a rather long traverse over an old rockslide. Someone has done a ton of work to flatten out a really good route for us. Our wildlife treat du jour was watching a red fox bounding up an impossibly steep slope and scaling near-vertical rocks with ease. Not sure what he was pursuing - a tasty marmot perhaps. As we started to go down again in earnest, the clouds started to lift - and, oh my, what a view! We sat for a while and just waited and watched as the high peaks and glaciers revealed themselves - stunning! It was a long way down; 1800m down today after 1100m up to the pass. We're staying in St. Niklaus tonight. We have made a change to our original plans for the next 2 days. We were originally going to walk the Europaweg and stay tomorrow night in the Europahutte mountain hut. We've been hearing reports and rumours of landslides, rockfall and bridges out on various portions of the route so we will walk through the valley directly to Zermatt tomorrow and spend an extra day there - day-hiking or perhaps souvenir shopping. Some folks are still attempting the Europaweg so we hope to catch up with them in Zermatt to see how it was.