Hike

Well, the power in the whole city got cut and erased it all, damn, o well, time to write it again.

For Easter, we decided to go Hiking in Switzerland. The group consisted of Shane, Evan, Tommy, Keegan, and I. We originally wanted to go in the Alps but the snow would have been a meter deep, not good for walking without snow shoes. Luckily Evan found a sweet trans-swiss trail that goes across Switzerland (north to south) in 31 days. Our plan was to do 6 days of the plan in 3 days (2 day hikes per day).

We started our journey off Thursday night taking the free train to Porrentruy. We arrived at 11pm and proceeded to do some night hiking to get a head start as well as to find a good place to setup our tents (city camping isn't good, high chance of getting caught). We settled down for the night at 1am. The spot we camped on was on a pretty severe slope so it was tough to stop from sliding. It wasn't too cold but Tommy was freezing (he wasn't wearing much originally) and assumed the fetal position for much of the night. The fact that we had 3 people (Tommy, Keegan and I) in a 2 person tent meant not much room, and coupled with Tommy's position we were forced into a 3way spooning session all night, fun stuff. When we woke up, we found that our tent has slide a foot or 2 down the mountain, cool. We got up pretty late (10am) and started the first leg. This section of the hike would take us to Porrentruy via Fréteux, Les Chainions, abd Seleute . The journey was 18km and was easy since it was mainly downhill.


It took around 4 hours to complete. The town of St-Uranne was really neat since it was one of Switzerland's medeval towns.


We found out they had a bat cave near by, but all the bats would still be sleeping so it wouldn't be too cool. We did see 1 bat flying around though. After lunch, we started on our second day hike of the day, this time to Soubey via Tariche, Le Champios, abd Les Moulins. This hike was 15km and was all across level ground. We pretty much followed the river Doubs for the whole Journey.




The trip took us around 3 hours. We decided to setup our tents just outside the city and to get a lot of sleep since the next day hikes would be much tougher.

We got up early the next day (8am) and started hiking at 9. This nights sleep was a little worse for me since the land we were on was very lumpy and was forcing me towards to wall of the tent. This caused water to seep in and soaked my sleeping bag :(


Evan and Shane took off first and we never saw them till the end. The plan was to do the hike to Saignelégier first (through Lobchez, Passerelle de Clairbief, Moulin Jeannottat, and Les Pommerats), then hike to St-Imier afterwards. The first leg was 13km and was very tough since there was an uphill of 700m.


To make matters worse, my left foot was really hurting and I couldn't put pressure on it at all. After borrowing some tape from Tommy, I taped up my foot so there would be no motion in it and started on the walk. I needed a walking stick to get by, it was tough. The hiking path we were on got flooded by the high river and we had to take a detour up a hill. The beginning of the hike was also really muddy which sucked. We managed to get lost a few times missing signs and all but it was ok. 1/2 way up the uphill section it began raining so we went into the woods for shelter. It became clear that with the weather and my foot, we wouldn't be able to do the 2nd leg that day (good thing since it was 19km uphill again. Since we knew we'd only do the one leg, we decided to take it easy and wait out the rain a little. We proceded to build a fire in the forest and cooked our meal. It was pretty relaxing and warm and killed about 2 hours.


The rain finally died down a bit and we reached the town of Saignelégier at around 5. We walked to the train station and found Shane and Evan waiting there. They had also come to the conclusion to cut the hike short since the weather was gonna get worse and worse and the next section would be in the really snowy region (not fun).

So we only managed to do 3 day hikes in 2 days but it was really fun. Unfortunately we didn't get to make it to our destination of Neuchâtel but it was a fun trip. The scenery wasn't as magnificant as those in the alps but it was quite nice and was a fun little adventure.