Report #5

8/20/2002

Hi Everyone,

    Our Kandersteg experience exceeded everyone's expectation.  We hiked and climbed much, and did a bit more sight seeing than the last time our troop went to K'steg.  Our first set of overnight hikes into the Alps were more challenging than our second set.  I now know about four or five great hikes to take when we return.  As I mentioned in the last email message, we attended an International Bar‑B‑Q after completing our first hikes.  Then the day after the International Bar‑B‑Q was quite busy.  In the morning we took our bus into Bern the capital of Switzerland. Bern means "bears" in German, but it's spelled a little differently in German, i.e., "baeren."  As you might expect, guarding the entrance to the old city area is a bear pit with half a dozen large brown bears with claws that are at least five inches long.  The old city area is on an Island in the middle of the Aare River which was close to flood stage during our visit.  While at K'steg, we have learned that many European cities have experienced serious rain and flooding, while we have enjoyed incredibly beautiful weather in the Alps.  The old city of Bern has the Swiss Parliament and government buildings, many banks, and, as you might expect, a shopping district with hundreds of stores all designed to take your money.  The Swiss are very good at "taking" tourist money.  Albert Einstein lived in an apartment in Bern while he worked as patent clerk, and while he wrote his theory of relativity.  We saw the apartment.  Perhaps the best part of our visit to Bern was a trip to the city swimming pool park complex by the river.  The pools are free, and there are safe swimming areas in the river.  The afternoon was warm and most of the boys enjoyed the very cold swimming water.  However, the real attraction for our scouts was the possibility of seeing topless bathers.  As luck would have it, just before we had to leave, several topless bathers decided to sun themselves near us.  Our exit from the park was hilarious as the younger scouts walked single file past the topless young ladies.

We stopped on the way back to K'steg to buy food for a joint dinner with a troop from Germany.  We bought pasta swirls, sauce, bread and sodas and walked to the German's campsite.  Peter did the cooking while our scouts played a couple of group games like "Cat and Mouse" and "Concentration" with the German scouts (boys and girls).  After dinner, we attended the camp‑wide International Campfire. Michael performed for us; he juggled and did other tricks that the audience really enjoyed.  It was especially difficult performing as there wasn't much light for Michael to see his juggling equipment.  Troops from England, Germany, and Spain all performed, mostly a variety of songs, not skits as we do at home.  One German group had a unicyclist, and two boys who kept seven bowling pins in the air with their four hands.

After the campfire, we went back to the chalet to pack for our second set of hikes. Some of us are suffering from colds and did not go hiking.  Ben has an eye infection that he thought was snow blindness from his snow and ice climbing workshop.  A local doctor prescribed an antibiotic, and Ben is feeling much better.  Gary, Dan, Ryan, and Keegan have the worst symptoms, and spent the day sleeping and resting.  Shirley, Grayson, Jon, and Andrew took the train from k'steg to Thun and boarded a boat to sightsee in Spiez too.

Hikes in the mountains are not measured in miles, they are measured in hours and minutes, and altitude changes.  All of our hikes involved hikes of over 1500 meters.  Our first hikes took us five hours to get to altitude, while our second set of hikes were a little shorter, 1000 meters, and four hours.  Greg took most of the older scouts on an unguided hike to the Lamerental Hutte.  Peter, Oktawian, Josh, Jeremy, Sean, Michael, Bryan, Chris Poats, and Dave seemed to have had a great time.  Enroute, they came to a glacial lake and decided to cool off.  Some of them swam out to a rocky island in the lake, and when they finished swimming, three of the scouts, Josh, Oktawian and Sean, opted to hike along the trail in their wet boxers so they could dry.  In a while the group came to a flat glacial river basin where some of them decided it would be really cool to hike naked!  Who did what, you ask?  Peter, Okatwian, and Sean were the naked hikers who delighted a group of French ladies hiking with their dog off in the distance.  Viva Les Americans! Needless to say, the pants went back on as the boys reached the hut.

My group started out for our guided Glacier Workshop on the Freuden Ice field with 11 scouts, but Ryan was not feeling well and returned to the chalet.  We had an excellent guide, Ray, an Eagle Scout and a certified snow and ice climbing instructor from the Mt. Shasta area in California.  Needless to say our younger scouts did not hike naked!  However, don't be surprised when they are a little older, if on some future trip along the Appalachian trail, you run across some guys who decide to demonstrate this very European style of backpacking!

Since Gary couldn't go on the hike with me due to his having a cold, Chris Bond, was our second "adult," and I really appreciated his help.  The boys with us included Bobby, Jeff, Aaron, Matt, Marc, Justin, Jimmy and Brian, who all learned much interesting snow and ice climbing techniques.  For example, Ray showed us ice ax techniques for stopping falls.  Wearing crampons the boys dove into a steep snow/ice field head first both on their backs and stomachs and learned the proper techniques for arresting their slide.  The group also learned how to make "t" trenches for their ice axes, and use ropes and other equipment for climbing and repelling.  Then we demonstrated a crevasse rescue.  One of our two guides, Jocobo, a Spaniard, repelled into a 50 foot deep break in the glacier, and we set up ice screws and ropes with pulleys to rescue him.  The boys learned some interesting new knots like the Italian knot around a caribiner to both brake and rappel with.

The huts that we used on our second set of hikes were much like those on our first hikes. In the Freuden Hutte we had 80 people.  Chris said that the room where we slept with 30 people was smaller than his dorm room at Duke.  At 3:00 a.m., people were getting up so that they could start climbing up the glacier before the sun warmed the ice.  The idea is to avoid avalanches, and soft ice and snow later in the day.  Our dinner in the Freuden Hutte consisted of noodles, bread and hot rose hip tea. Breakfast included bread, a variety of soft cheeses, jam, and more hot tea or coffee.  I brought Iodine tablets with me to purify the water we used to refill our containers for the trip down.

Both the older and younger scouts returned to the chalet around noon, showered, repacked their gear and then we took off for the youth hostel in Luzern to spend the night before going on to Germany.  We crossed Liechtenstein where we stopped for lunch, and then drove across Austria and turned north just before Innsbruck.  Our destination was the youth hostel near Garmisch‑Partinkirchen, but we did not go to the hostel immediately.  Instead, we drove a little further north to see Linderhof, one of the three palaces and castles that Ludwig II built.  Linderhof is the smallest; it was his "hunting lodge."  The rooms inside are gilded, and filled with rare and beautiful objects.  Ludwig even had a cave/grotto built in the hillside behind his castle.  In his cave, he built an artificial lake with a gondola, and around the lake is a painting depicting Venus and other mythological characters.  Ludwig would have operas and plays performed in the grotto for him alone as a servant  rowed him around in the gondola.  The grotto is all artificial; masons molded concrete to look like rocks, stalactites and stalagmites.  All of it is very weird.

We got to the hostel outside Garmisch in time for dinner, and discovered we were sharing the facilities with a German school group from the area around Bonn.  After dinner most of us took the bus or walked into the town center.  Food places were only things open, but we enjoyed walking around and having some ice cream under the Zugspitz, the highest mountain in Germany.

In the morning, we went north to see the concentration camp at Dachau.  I spent some time during our bus ride talking about the history of Germany and the rise of Hitler and the Nazis to prepare the boys for what they were going to see.  In the concentration camp, we got audio phones for everyone, and the boys spread out across the memorial individually, at their own pace.  I believe, they were all moved by the experience, and several talked to me afterwards to say how disturbing the place and information was.  I told them that I was very proud of them for visiting Dachau, and how important it was for them to tell people back home about what they learned so that this can never be allowed to happen again.

The mood changed dramatically as we left Dachau and headed to Munich to spend the afternoon sightseeing and eating.  I will describe more about our experiences in Munich and Bavaria in my next, and, most likely, final European email message.

Philip Sternberg