Conquering Calanda

One of Andrea's pictures of Mt. Calanda in the springtime - taken from their mountain house. (There wasn't this much snow on it when we were hiking.)

Hiking along the trail

Our picnic spot was 360 degrees of beautiful

Look closely and you can see me under the far left tree!

An image from the hut website of where they are located. We hiked along a ridge from the left side of the pic.

Enjoying a Calanda beer after a long day of hiking

Andrea and Joel at the top!

Yeah we made it! Now the hard part, hiking all the way back down.

Last Saturday morning we made a trip into the mountains with our friends Joel and Andrea. We had made the plan last year to hike to the peak of Mt. Calanda - a goal of theirs' for quite some time, and we were happy to be invited along for the challenge.

Our original plan was to go last August, but the weather did not cooperate. Thankfully, our last weekend for Matt and me in Switzerland was a beautiful one and we were able to embark upon our journey.

We hiked for 6 hours on Saturday, not including our picnic time. We spent Saturday night in a Swiss Alpine Club mountain hut. There we were able to ease our muscles with some Calanda beer and enjoyed an amazing 4 course meal with about 14 other hikers.

The next morning we made our way to the Calanda peak. We hiked another 8.5 hours on Sunday. So in total, there were 14.5 hours of hiking on roughly 20 miles of trail (or not trail, depending on if we could find markers) and climbed at least a mile in elevation. Needless to say, we were spent. It no doubt could have gone faster, but it was the first real hike of the season for all of us and they were happy to patiently go our at beginner's pace.

It was the best way possible to say goodbye to Switzerland.