Global Gauthier's: We Should Have Learned from Mount Doom

The day was started off easily enough, waking up early in the Rotstuckhutte and having some breakfast. We set off before anyone else in some slight rain with faith it would clear up. But, we still wore our garbage bags in top of rain jackets- we'd learned our lesson while climbing Tongariro in New Zealand!

We could see the top of the Schiltorn most of the hike, and it didn't seem to be very far away, maybe 2 hours away. And we hiked and hiked

through some very steep and very rough terrain. At the top of a crest, the wind picked up, and around 2500m I could sense the altitude making me much more tired than I should have been. But we kept going, taking more and more frequent breaks. Than 40 minutes (though we didn't know how long at the time) before the peak, it began snowing, and blowing, and being extremely cold. We had no gloves, hats, or real warm clothes but we figured we could take it, plus we had no choice

at this point. But after 20 minutes, my hands started getting past the point of kinda-numb-cold, and began shooting pain up my wrist. So we started worrying a bit not knowing how far it, or how much colder it would get. So I walked the rest of the way with my hands up my shirt and we didn't stop the last 20 minutes up very steep climbing. Finally after a could scare and not stopping for fear of freezing, we made it to the top!

While it felt like the hardest and most challenging 3 hour hike ever for us and we were happy to be alive, many people were at the top carefree in the beautiful restaraunt and shop! The easy (and expensive way up) was the cablecar, so 100s of people had come up on that! We were only slightly bitter.

We decided we deserved a treat. So after changing into dry cloths we went up to the revolving restaraunt and shared a bowl of fries and hot

chocolate. Only 14 Francs- what a steal! For an hour he clouds and storm remained and we couldn´t see any mountains until finally it cleared. The view was incredible!

After warming up and a couple no-rain prayers for a couple hours we headed off down the mountain. I cut holes in my socks to make them leg warmers instead of my one pair of wet pants, Mile wore her water shoes instead of wet boots, and I carried both of our backpacks to stop Milessa´s knees from starting to ache (2 backpacks is easier to carry than 1 Milessa).

After a few hours and a quick stop on a mountain-

side for church, we made it Gimmelwald when it got dark and started raining. So we caved and took a short cablecar to the valley floor and to Lauterburnnen to the Valley Hostel.

The next morning we actually took it easy and relaxed for a quite a while before sending home a couple Swiss Army knives for the Gauthier family and myself.

We then hopped on a bus to Basel where we would sleep in the airport overnight for our EasyJet flight to Porto, Portugal!