Sunday walk: Chäseren to Braunwald

Another Sunday, another walk.

Chäseren to Braunwald, which I’ve been promising myself I’d do for a while. 16km horizontal, 1200m vertical (and back down again). Took about six hours.

Map route link.

This isn’t Alpine grade, which means it’s apparently easy. It was mostly walking on a decent path, except for about 5km or so at the top was was all ice-cracked rubble; and the album pic is of a short descent quite near Braunwald which involved a narrow ledge on the side of a cliff (that section descends 500m vertically in 500m horizontally)…

I took lots of photos, which as usual turned into fairly generic rocky landscapes. Quite pretty generic rocky landscapes, though.

Looking across the high plateau towards Braunwald (the bottom of the distant valley is 1600m below where I am standing).

Even at 2140m, where the only paths are paint splashes on the rocks, the signposts are perfect. Of course.

Mass fields of ice-smashed rubble. Most of those blocks are half a metre across.

The top isn't all bare rock. This is about 2000m up; there are grazing cattle on this grass (although not in this photo, as I was more interested in the distant mountains --- Pilatus, I think).

Looking down towards Braunwald (the village in the centre of the frame). It's only about 700m vertical metres from here.

Taken on the way down the cliff to Braunwald. This is a red-and-white path, which ostensibly means 'not Alpine grade, easy'. In this case it actually means 'half a metre wide with vertical cliffs on one side'.

The girl in foreground was casually strolling down, not using the handholds and not worrying about the height at all. She must be Swiss.