Thurgau & the Tanneggergrat

26 April 2023

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At the start of the month Zürich Canton had a new law come into force whereby dogs must always be leashed in the forest. This is a terrible law like many other terrible laws targeting dog owners. The ostensible purpose is to protect the wild animals, but dogs are killing wild animals. Cats are. It is, however, much easier to ticket a dog owner walking their dog than catch a hunting cat and then find its owner to ticket. Ergo I have been taking Paula and Eddie across the canton border to St Gallen & Thurgau to run freely. Yesterday we headed over to Bichelsee and ran up into the nearby forested hills. Up some steep steps and we found ourselves running in the high meadows. The dogs loved it! Then it was on to Tanneggergrat. The suffix "-grat" is one I have seen in placenames throughout Switzerland, but before yesterday I hadn't bothered to learn. Looking on Google Translate one learns that "Grat" means "ridge". The Tanneggergrat is not what I would call a ridge though. You are running on roots and rocks on a path often less than a meter wide with steep 100 meter declines on both sides. Maybe there's not a good English translation for "Grat" because no one in the English speaking world would put a trail there. Heck, in any US National Park either side's cliff would warrant a guardrail. The Swiss just warn you to have good shoes, which I've actually never seen anywhere else here, so I suppose that's something. I wonder what prompted adding that sign tough. Did someone fall to their death and the investigator looked at the body and went "oh, bad shoes"? Or did a number of people who usually hike in bad footwear come across this path atop a razor's edge and have to turn back? While we may never solve the mystery we did enjoy the afternoon running freely together in Thurgau.