Boot’s Blog

I am John’s trusty Lowa boots, however he doesn’t trust himself when we speed along (rightly, sort of his ‘getting frail’ age) therefore he also uses his Leki sticks…sometimes. We covered 107km in 9 days walking but don’t get excited most was down mountain or at best along mountain and occasionally uphill.Lots of my walking was done on ice and rock, stepping stones. So this is the pearl of the Alps Saas Fee – beautiful save the glacier is recedingI was not stepping on these Alpine flowers I am just trying to show you their size. They are everywhere and very pretty, very.

Version 2 I do occasionally put my feet up, stop for a rest or a view, we don’t do coffee. This looks steep, it was, I am pretty sure John was a scaredy cat, he walked but rarely looked down – he should have seen it from my view!This is an avalanche protection barrier, there was no snow above or on the paths today but there was another steep drop to the village below, good job John trusts me.The paths are well marked, well signposted but always marked in “hours”. These times were measured using local olympic walkers so I had to add at least 50% extra time.See now there is a lunch stop view. John takes lunch, we would happily keep trekking. He can be weedy.and here is a close up of the waterfall into that Lake, notice that as the star I am still in focus.

This is John riding the cable cars. He likes it, as he gets up big mountains quickly, we Lowa’s think of it as – well cheating.This is a small glacial pool, which I crossed at just under 4,000m, and yes I did get wet but being a Lowa I’m Ok with that, as I am very waterproof. Mind it was cold, icy cold unsurpsingly.…..and these are the surroundings but the scale is tricky if you can enlarge the photo you’ll see those little dots at the top are climbers….This day we took him into proper ‘over 10,000ft’ snow and ice, notice the trousers, first time we’ve met them. This looks like sludge as it’s the bottom of the glacial snow line. We welched in this for about 200m, that is 200m more than the last time we were here, which is thanks to global warming. That Leki pole sneaked in – he needed that as the snow was, well slippery.Here is the snow plus marker pole, just beyond was a few thousand metre drop, visibility was either great or down to 5m. Shortly after this we were taken for hot chocolate, but JD drank it all. Huh promises promises.and this is us on the glacier underneath that top, it was a bit scarey too, made worse by rock falls which prevents us walking further…secretly pleased wethinks.Socks, we needed to pay homage to socks. Socks, thank you.