Hopefully you’re not viewing the above map on your mobile phone because it’s worthwhile expanding this photo and looking at the beautiful depiction of the eastern Switzerland’s mountains. We had a couple of days of inclement weather and took advantage of them by visiting a glacier up close and then the following day taking a ride on the Bernina express route from Pontresina over Bernina Pass into Italy.
This map by the way, shows almost everywhere that we’ve been for the first two weeks of our trip here in Switzerland. We stayed in Maloja in the top right-hand corner for four nights doing day hikes out of that region and then moved to Pontresina in the center of the map and did day hikes out of there, as well as the glacier and the train trip to Italy. Now we’re down in the lower left-hand corner and the Swiss national Park.
The featured Highpoint in this area is being able to see the 4049m peak called Piz Bernina. And one of the many advantages of staying the Pontresina hotels is being given an Engadiner transportation pass that allows you to take the trains, buses and gondolas in the entire region. We had planned to take an easy hiking day by visiting the Morteratsch Glacier from the Diavolezza gondola. There are several short hikes up on top with views of the several other glaciers, however when we made it through the low hanging clouds to arrive at Diavolezza we found 4 to 6 inches of fresh snow on all the trails we planned to hike so we limited ourselves to very short excursions and lots of photo opportunities. We got our daily mileage in by hiking the valley all the way back to Pontresina rather than taking the train.
It’s here we saw the long white pillows shown in earlier post where we asked you to guess what they might be. I guessed that they were covering 6 feet of snow so that they would have an early start on the ski season but in fact are preserving the glacier, covering two to three meters of the glacier.
The Bernina Express is just one leg of a private railroad system the runs throughout this eastern portion of Switzerland’smountains. This particular route made me think of the comparison between the Durango Silverton narrow gauge as it passes through a similar distance of wilderness in the San Juan Mountains. This route is not through wilderness as it passes through a number of small villages and even towns but it does go through some spectacular scenery and goes over a 2900 m pass, with views of all those peaks and glaciers not to mention precipitous views of valleys. This route has one remarkable featuring where it turns underneath itself as shown above in the photo. We ate our salami, bread and cheese on a park bench in Italy and turned around and came back on the same route and I’ll say it was far less tiring then the round trip on the Durango Silverton narrow gauge.
