Horn & Tobel
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5 July 2022
Sunday morning, as the accordions played and the yodelers yodeled, I set out from the Dorfplatz in Stand with around 300 other crazy people to run up a mountain. Many times over the next couple of hours I wondered what I had gotten myself into, especially when I couldn't see how far down the cliff next to me went. If there's a cure to acrophobia it's perhaps in acclimation. And being too focused on running and not falling to have time to pay attention to the danger. I literally could fall to my death with a mistep. But accomplishing the goal and reaching the summit was that much more rewarding. The Swiss name their peaks "horn" when there is a sharp drop off of at least two sides. The last kilometer up the Stanserhorn was running on a knife's edge with the Bernese Alps in the distance to my left and the Vierwaldstättersee down to my right. Iwona and Paula rode the cable car up to cheer me on at the finish line and then we lunched on Älplermagronen. Strange to discover that the Swiss put applesauce on their macaroni and cheese. Afterward I joined Iwona in the dangling deathbox down, which was not just any dangling deathbox, but one you could stand outside on top of. Trust the engineers....
Yesterday I felt I had to make it up to Paula since she wasn't allowed to run with up the Stanserhorn. We settled on the running the Erlenbach-Küsnacht-Tobelweg. A "tobel" is basically the opposite of a "horn" in Swiss parlance. It's a deep ravine with sharp sides. It's good for running with an energetic dog like Paula, because she can get a lot of excerise running up and down the sides while I follow the trail and she can cool off and drink from the creek. The creeks flowed through enough limestone that the (often manmade) falls had acquired flowstone deposits of calcium carbonate. In the creek down to Erlenbach this flowstone was especially impressive and like nothing I've seen outside of a cave, even the Polilimnio falls in western Greece near Kalamata.
Flowstone falls in Erlenbach
Flowstone falls in Polilimnio (2017)
