first, the good news.

They let people back into Los Alamos! Which means, on the one hand, a town full of smoke, but on the other, a town that's out of danger. Sadly, the fire has now moved north, towards Native American lands, and is now close to 150,000 acres. That's not small. So continue to keep my fellow New Mexicans in your thoughts.

Next, more good news: Mike and I survived our "gourmet hike." Might not sound so tough--or very surprising--to most people, but I will admit that there were moments when I felt like my survival was not at all guaranteed.  This may be due to the fact that I am extremely out of shape, but I maintain that the mountain had it out for me. Or at least for my poor Jello-like knees. At any rate, the premise of a gourmet hike is to hike up the side of a mountain, have an 8-course meal, spend the night in an Alpine hiking hut, then come back down the next day. Hike we did, and eat we did. And also spending the night, but that part's not terribly interesting, other than the fact that we thought we were going to be sleeping in the giant communal-mattress room, but ended up in a small 12-person room with our own bunk beds, pillows, and duvets. Duvets, people. That was LIVING. (Although if I'd known, I wouldn't have carried my sleeping bag, pointlessly, all the way up to the hut. Bygones.)

Anyway. The photos. Disclaimer: this post is very heavy on the photos. Sorry, and then deal with it. 

Grindelwald, southwest of Zurich, near Interlaken. Spent the night here before the hike. This is what we saw rolling into town: clouds on the mountains.

This is what we saw the next morning from the hostel window. Seriously. 

View from the trailhead. The pointy one on the right is the north face of the Eiger, which is, unbeknownst to me, very famous. (And also the source of the brand name, The North Face.)

Our first view of the glacier, complete with waterfall. Here's a nifty little map; we were between the Wetterhorn and the Schreckhorn. Grindelwald is in the valley behind/below us.

And then we turned the corner and this happened. Glacier on the saddle between the Wetterhorn and the Schreckhorn (the peak on the right).

And then you turn around and see your first view of the hut: it's that teeny tan speck on that rock outcrop. IT'S STILL SO FAR AWAY. And so far up.

Our fellow hikers from Zurich: Thomas, Rene, Aaron, and Nanda...just for scale.

There were wildflowers everywhere. Some overlaps with the Rocky Mountain wildflowers, but some I've never seen before. Neat.

A wild Edelweiss, which is supposedly fairly rare. We saw tons of them. I know this photo is out of focus, but I want you to see just how weird looking these things are. I think they are alien life forms. Everyone else seems to just love them.

The first thing we saw when we got to the hut: the "wine fridge." 

Aaron, Rene, and Mike, celebrating the hike. And the delicious barbecued lunch we were about to have.

View down the valley to Grindelwald from the hut's terrace.

The hut.

Wild Forget-Me-Nots. I LOVE THEM.

My friend the marmot.

Appetizers on the terrace: bubbly and various fancy breads with various fancy dips, oils, and spreads. YUM. This picture does the temperature no justice, however: it was SO VERY COLD and windy out there.

Alpine wildflowers on the dining tables.

So they have these mountain goat-y things called steinbocks, and the hut keepers salt the rocks and rock walls, and the goats come and lick at it for a while. These two were only momentarily diverted from salt licking by some sort of minor territorial dispute.

Goats. Licking salt. Their horns are NEAT.

More goats. I love the hushed, multi-lingual voices of our fellow hikers in the background.

So I've done for you the courtesy of not posting pictures of all of the dinner courses...just my favorites. This was no. 4: sturgeon with balsamic vinegar topping, on top of various legumes and pesto. So tasty.

They alternated where the courses were served, so we had to keep going back to the frigid outdoors. Which is why the photos of goats are interspersed. This one is goats. Licking salt. In the sunset.

Course no. 5: truffle gnocchi with foie gras. I could really have skipped the foie gras (I don't see what the big deal is!) in favor of a double helping of gnocchi. Yum.

Sunset from the terrace.

Maybe my favorite course: dessert. Flourless chocolate cake, chocolate-filled ravioli with cherry sauce, and a single liqueur-filled, chocolate-covered cherry. AMAZING.

The view behind the hut, up the Wetterhorn.

There was a second peak on the Schreckhorn, entirely unknown to us the first day 'cause of the cloud cover. Surprise!

Blue ice = fresh avalanches. This thing was dropping ice several times an hour. It sounded like thunder.

You can't quite get the scale of this place from any of my photos, but here's a view from the "trail" (sliver carved out of the rock, more like!) down to another section of the trail. The tiny colored dots are actual people. It was a steep drop, friends.

These amazing pink-flowered shrubby things were everywhere. 

There was a waterfall over the trail: here's Mike crossing under it.

I loved these weird little purple flowers.

And this weird little flower. Which I saw at the Botanic Gardens the other day, as well. 

Will we go back next year? I don't know. It was a pretty neat experience, having fancy food in a very non-fancy, unlikely, and extremely beautiful place...but it was also a pretty tough (ok, so only about a 3.5-hour) slog, and fairly miserable for me because of my stupid, defective knees, and inability to sleep in any bed other than my own. Mike is sold, but I'm not quite. The good news is that I have a whole year to think about it. And maybe even train a little for it. ;)

What I'm reading: I've finished The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, by Robert M. Edsel, as well as A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, another Bill Bryson book. The Monuments Men was truly an interesting, appalling, and heroic story, but I have to confess that in some points, the story was overshadowed by the author's tendency to be redundant (hint: skip the introduction--he'll repeat most of it word-for-word throughout the rest of the book) and to be a gushing, unabashed admirer of his subjects (the Monuments Men, I mean...). There are some really interesting characters, though, and the story itself is truly interesting. A Walk in the Woods was, as are most of Bryson's books, interesting and entertaining, but overall, a little bit dark and slightly depressing. Not nearly as gleeful as In a Sunburned Country (which remains my favorite of his books), this one dealt with attempting to walk the entire trail, as well as tidbits about its history, with a little natural history thrown in. I'm now into Lost in Shangri-La, another nonfiction (I'm hooked!! you just cannot find fiction that's as good as nonfiction!) about the story of a handful of people who survived a plane crash in the super-isolated mountains of New Guinea in 1945. So far, it's extremely tragic, but tremendously fascinating. 

Next up: a brief jaunt into Bavaria...a quick trip to Augsburg, Germany.