Uetliberg

Back home, the Pacific Northwest held a number of interesting sights. Still, it was often difficult to become motivated enough to visit even those just a short drive away. The presence of friends makes this much easier. Last weekend I had a visit from a former colleague (great to see you again Bryan!), and this was just the motivation I needed to head outside and try a few things. While we made multiple trips around Zurich and Winterthur, one of the last things we did was take a trek up the mountain of Uetliberg. (I will save the analysis of watching an American-made English-language film dubbed completely in German -and 3D!- for later...)

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The first task was getting to the mountain. It's only 873 m [2864 ft] high. Compared to many in Switzerland, Uetliberg is more like a small hill on the Southwest side of Zurich. The S10 train route runs from near the top back to the main station, shallowing the grade by wrapping clockwise around the mountain. As we had already spent some of the day about the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, we decided to simply hop on the S10 at the nearest station. This turned out to be the one shown in the middle of this map.

We get to the station ...how?

If it looks as though the station is in the middle of the river, that's because it is. The train takes a tunnel from the main station, along under this river, before coming out near the base of the mountain. While I'm not sure when this rail line was laid in relation to the rest all over the city, I must admit there are advantages to digging up a river and dropping a train tunnel under it. Most notably, there likely isn't anything already built there.

View of the bridge from the station attached to it

The glass-covered stairs lead to tracks below (It was quite a bit cooler under the river).

A scan of the map on the station's ticket machine reveals that while the S10 line has only a half-dozen stops or so, the last few nip the edges of two other travel zones, doubling the cost of a ticket to the mountain's top. This is undoubtedly a clever ploy by the railroad to extract more money for what is expected to be a tourist-ish pleasure outing. But with few clouds in the sky, the view is certain to be more than worth it. Off we go...

The journey takes about 15 minutes, with more whistled crossings than stations on the trip up the mountainside. Once at the top, a sign-post holds pointers in all directions, indicating distant places at the end of walking trails and the time it takes to reach them. Some of these were well over an hour. The place we were headed was labeled "10 min."

There's a hotel and restaurant up here, at the peak of the mountain; and I wonder what a chore bringing supplies up is. Also along the trail is a model of the solar system, (the Germans really like their scale models) with each heavenly body properly dimensioned in relative size and distance. The sun sat on a 10 ft tall post, like an oversized light a few feet in diameter. The next was Mercury, little more than a BB, stuck in a plastic block embedded in a rock about a dozen paces up the path. We saw one or two others before the trail split and we headed up toward the hotel.

At a flat spot near the peak there sat a clump of trees, growing in what looked like a raised bed. Rocks circled the bed, though it was difficult to tell that they had been deliberately placed there. The plaque revealed secret of this arranged set of boulders.

"Interior Walls and Ditches of Prehistoric Fortress Uetliberg -- about 1000 BC"

Interesting. And onward we went.

After a short walk we arrived at the hotel. The view from the fenced edges of the mountain-top was nice and clear.

Looking Northeast across the city of Zurich. The airport is in the far background.

The city pressed against the tip of the lake. Some of the oldest parts of town are in the middle of this photo.

Looking down the lake shows houses crowding the banks.

The lake takes a bend, with buildings all along it. The Alps sit in the distance.

Also on top of this hill is a communications tower, and a observation tower. A short climb later, we were at the deck of the 70m [230 ft] observation tower.

A small valley on the West side of the mountain ridge holds quaint little houses with wood-fired ovens full of fresh bread, or at least I imagine they do...

After a while, we climbed down and made our way to one of the hotel's outside serving counters. Four large bottles of champagne sat in ice in an ornate silver bucket. Bryan asked the woman for two beers, and she ducked back into the building. She returned with two glasses of amber-colored liquid. I'm not a fan of the dark beers myself, but I've had a few similar to this one in the weeks since I've been here, and I have to say they are growing on me. We tore apart the braided Zopf half-loaf we had brought inside Bryan's backpack and spent a few minutes in the shade of a table umbrella.

We had already-paid passage back to the main station by rail, but Uetliberg has several walking trails criss-crossing its slope facing the city. We decided to try one on the way down, the first one we came to while descending from the hotel in fact, though it didn't have an official sign on it. A few steps in, and it was obvious somebody intended it to be used as a trail, since some time had been invested in installing stairs on the steepest parts of the mountain face.

Steps made from logs split lengthwise in fours. (Note how they're each held in place by two sharpened spikes.)

These have handrails! A train ride on the way up; stairs with a handrail on the way down! Could this get any easier?

Okay, maybe they went overboard on the stairs. Some of these are even quite steep...

The trail which seems so unmistakable at the top was slowly becoming more difficult to identify. The stairs soon ran out completely, and what was left had sections that appeared largely unused.

Eventually, we popped out of the edge of the forest, to find a steep field of grass, with planks nailed down to short logs set in the ground. They both kept us from sliding down the hill, and pointed us to right entrance in the trees on the other side.

The trail cuts across a clearing, with a good view of the city below.

Some places looked to require some attention, though it was surprising how much work had been done out in the woods already.

Nice of them to build a bridge for us.

Okay, so the bridge could use some work too...

After some twists and turns, we found ourselves unsure of the path forward, and the hillside had enough variation in features that it wasn't hard to imagine reaching a dead-end and having to return along the way you came. In one instance, the trail seemed to end at a moderate cliff. Only when you got quite close to the edge could you see a series of rocks that seemed to allow passage down. We weren't the most prepared explorers, both needing better shoes, and the lack of anything soft at the bottom of that wall convinced us to do our only back-tracking of the day. This is not to say that I was always confident in the expected outcome of our current direction.

We were able to check our position using my iPhone, which was not receiving service, having been disconnected shortly after I arrived. However, the GPS is a passive system, which means the phone could plot our current position from the signal it was getting for free from the positioning satellites. I had pulled up a map of the area via my apartment's wifi connection before leaving, and this stayed in the device's cache, giving us some meaning in reference to the plotted dot that represented us. We saw that we had made it almost half-way down the mountain, in a straight shot to the city. I don't think we could have chosen a steeper path if we had tried, nor one further from the train tracks.

I hope we don't have to find our way back up this slippery leaf-covered slope.

Wait... this doesn't look all that promising either. (Actually, this led back to the main path... eventually).

Once we got nearer the bottom of the hill, we joined up with a much more official-looking path. This ultimately connected to a wide horse trail. Finally, we made it out of the woods and along a plot of rental gardens. We hopped on a returning S10 train at a nearby station, and settled in -quite tired out- on the ride back home.

Thanks again for visiting, Bryan. Next time we'll get better shoes and climb up.