My father labored under the weight of his pack as he navigated a rocky pitch in the Swiss Alps. Rain pelted his face as he tracked an air-rescue helicopter into the pass above.
Toothy peaks framed the passage through the mountains. Veins of snow crawled down from the gap and onto the trail. A cold permanent chill had breached his rain gear hours earlier.
“Lucky guy’s getting a ride off the mountain,” my father said.
My 58-year-old father, John Pearsall, has practiced pediatrics in small communities across the United States for 29 years. In the past, his duties limited our outdoor excursions to only a few hours. A recent move opened up more free time than he had experienced in three decades. I had the summer off from graduate studies at Boston University. We could finally go on a great outdoor adventure.
The day before, on June 4, my father and I stepped off a train in Sargans, Switzerland, at the eastern terminus of the Swiss Via Alpina trail. In the weeks following, we planned to hike the width of Switzerland, 220 miles across the Alps.
The trail crosses 16 high alpine passes and climbs the equivalent of 2.2 Everests or more than 65,000 cumulative feet. A 100-mile section of the trail was named “The World’s Best Hike” by Backpacker Magazine.
Our guidebook said the view from the first pass would leave “no doubt as to what lies ahead in the days to come.” We knew better. In the wild, conditions can change rapidly.
At the final, slippery slope, we crawled on our hands and knees to the gap. Streams of cold water ran down our bare hands.
“This has to get better,” my father said.
We looked west and saw nothing. A wall of gray clouds blocked our vision.
After several more days of bad weather, we experienced our first sunny day in Altdorf. We shed our rain gear and had magnificent views every step of the way. Lake Lucerne glistened to our north. Eight-thousand-foot peaks dazzled on the horizon line.
We steadied ourselves on cables as we crossed a thin ridge. On either side of the knife edge were cattle ranches a thousand feet below. Beyond the ridge: snow.
“You have got to be kidding me,” my father said.
Snow had already forced us to backtrack and skip a section of the trail the day before.
Nevertheless, my father gritted his teeth and led us forward slowly. One slip and we’d be launched a thousand feet to the valley floor.
We established a rhythm: kick, kick, stomp, stomp, step. We kept one hand on the snowy slope above us. We wobbled with every step, our centers of gravity raised by our heavy packs.
We set our sights on a crest in the trail a few hundred feet ahead. We hoped it was Surenenpass and that the other side would be free of snow.
My eyes hurt from focusing on the featureless slate of white at my feet. I searched for signs of weakness in the snowpack. Every few feet a stomp sent a chunk of snow sliding down the slope. A thin layer of snowmelt lubricated the slide and the chunks accelerated to a rocky projection over the valley. They flew hundreds of feet and smashed onto a boulder field below.
The intensity of the hundred foot stretch exhausted our bodies and minds. We collapsed over the final crest. We looked west and were disappointed by more snow—this time thousands of feet of it. It clung to the mountain at a 45-degree angle. Cornices of snow projected from ridges above. Surenenpass was buried in it.
There was no sign of the trail.
We found a signpost but the signs had been removed. I leaned my bag against it and bent to pick up some snow. I clinched it into a ball, cursed, and hurled it off the edge.
We’d been thwarted by snow again. We turned around and headed back down the mountain. An athletic woman in her 60s climbed up towards us. A nike headband kept short white hair out of her eyes. Her skin was bronzed by years in the sun.
“You are early,” the woman said. “Surenenpass means ‘long snow.’”
She pulled out a map and showed us the areas typically buried beneath snow until September or October. We heard what sounded like cannon blasts and looked back to see cornices of snow breaking off the rock walls. Loosened by the heat of the sun, the shelves of snow broke free and slammed onto the path below. A red air-rescue helicopter buzzed by overhead.
We accepted that we couldn’t hike across Switzerland in June. We hiked 110 miles and climbed 25,000 cumulative feet, but we couldn’t allow our first great adventure together to end in failure.
We shouldered our bags and headed east. We would hike across Liechtenstein instead. All 8 miles of it.