Day 2 — The Miracle At Stoos Ridge
My wife Janis and I recently celebrated our 40th anniversary with a 12-day hiking trip to the Swiss Alps (dipping our hiking sticks briefly into France as well). Our hearts are still flush with the afterglow of the wonders we saw (and cowbells we heard). Here’s the next installment of our adventures. There’s also a 7-minute video of this amazing hike on my YouTube channel. Hope you check it out!
Though we made tasty lemonade out of it, losing Mount Rigi on Day 1 was a large lemon. This was not a museum vacation, or shopping vacation, or visit-the-family vacation. We invested in high quality luggage backpacks (the Alpa Cotopaxi 42L), and hauled our hiking gear 4,134 miles from DC to Zurich not to sit around a fondue pot discussing European post-impressionism.
It was bad enough that our boutique hotel was trying way too hard to please guests with modern-art sensibilities, of which I had none. Modern art is as obvious an oxymoron as exists, and when I see it, it generally causes me to twitch uncontrollably and blurt out, “Why?” over and over again. And naturally, in our bathroom hung two oddly shaped naked baby figurines — one black one white — stretched out on their stomachs. Why????
All this to say, when we woke up the next morning, I needed wide swaths of ocean blue sky overlooking vistas of mountain peaks and lakes, and I needed it now (or at least shortly after finding a cup of steaming, black coffee, for — would you believe — there was no coffee maker in the room! I had two naked babies watching me shower and do my business, but in the country that gives us Rolex watches and Swiss army knives, no coffee maker. Why?????)
The Day’s Quest
On the schedule for today — based on hours of meticulous video research back home — was a 4–5 hour hike along Stoos Ridge (pronounced by the locals we talked to as Stoze, not Stooz, though Stooz rhymes with more things and is funner. If you choose to hike Stoos, avoid booze, or your shoes’ll, slip in ooze, and you’ll lose, with a cruise, down the flues, singing blues, while you muse, on the views. But nope, it’s Stoze, so never mind all that.
Take a hardback book, open it up a little bit, then put it lengthwise on the table in front of you, with its spine toward the ceiling. Now imagine a 6,300-foot-mountain shaped like that, with you traversing its spine, and you’ll have a picture of what makes Stoos such an irresistible hiking destination.
We spied one thin crease of blue in an otherwise milky-white sky as we walked toward the train station that morning. But our weather app promised improving conditions, so with algorithmic hope leading us, we boarded the IR26 train for a 45-minute ride past our good friend Lake Zug to Schwyz, pronounced Schwiz? Schweiz? I don’t even think the Swiss know. There is no such thing as an official “Swiss” language. Their nearly 9-million citizens may speak one of four distinct languages, depending on their proximity to France, Germany, or Italy.
At Schwyz we transferred to the B501 bus for a 17-minute swervy scramble through a quaint old European village and countryside which, if this were another type of vacation, we would be happy to explore. But our crease of blue sky had started to widen, and we had a date, a destiny even, with a 6,300 foot mountain, and miles to climb before we slept.
The bus deposited us at the “Stoosbahn” ( bahn being a Germanic word referring to any type of transportation station). The Stoosbahn was the gateway to the Stoos wonderland — and what a gateway!
Getting off the bus, we looked straight up the face of a cliff, which stood like a battalion of palace guards with their swords aloft, bellowing, “None shall pass.” But these are the Swiss — Tolkien’s dwarves — who look at an obstacle like this, and smile. Stoos is a car-less mountain resort that can only be reached by taking what’s billed as the world’s steepest funicular (a 110% gradient) more than a mile up, across two bridges and through three tunnels.
The journey up to Stoos was like a ride into a magical kingdom. Speaking of which, it was the first time I had the thought that if ever Disneyland came to life as a real, living place, we were in it. I also wondered if Walt Disney had visited Switzerland before constructing his Magic Kingdom (and yes, later I learned he had.) I suppose the case might be made that Disney — because he was such an audacious visionary — built the theme-park Matterhorn first, then the Swiss — because they’re such dwarves — carved out a 14,000-foot mountain to imitate him. “No mountain can be that precisely angled,” I said to Janis a week later when I looked at the Swiss Matterhorn in person. “It’s gotta be fake.”
All I know for sure is that walking out into Stoos village after the ride up — a ride that truly put the fun into funicular — each of my senses tingled with a numinous expectation that something special was soon to happen. Clouds yet filled the sky around us, but to the north, you could see them breaking apart, like iceflows on a melting river. I zoomed in my video camera on a floating green land-island — Laputa straight out of Gulliver’s Travels — seemingly carried along in the iceflow clouds.
But our true destination was south of us, and 2,000 feet higher, and that view was not nearly as promising. We’d reach the Stoos ridge via a short hike, then a long chair lift ride straight up into a menacing, growling Rigi-esque cloudbank. It was disheartening to see, but a little voice seemed to whisper in my ears, “Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the Lord.” That’s the thing about faith. God does the heavy-lifting, but you have to step into the water, or take the field, or get out of the boat.
So we tramped up the hill toward the chairlift.
Further On, Higher Up
Oddly, our Swiss Travel Pass covered all our costs to Stoos village, but not the chairlift, which seemed a bit of larceny. But in for a penny, in for a Swiss franc. So we shelled out $70 for two lift tickets, then headed up, up, up, literally sight unseen, straight into John Carpenter’s classic horror movie, The Fog. Only our horror movie didn’t have the bellow of forhorns, but the clanging of cowbells from cattle below us that we could barely see. (And unlike the ghost-pirates, they weren’t trying to kill us.)
When we hopped off the lift at Klingenstock, the Stoos Ridge trail was officially right there at our feet. And that was about all we could see of it…the dirt at our feet.
I’ve heard it said that there’s always a Red Sea before you get your Promised Land. After Janis and I sold our house, left our jobs, and moved sight unseen to Los Angeles in 2016 so I could let my writing-self come out to play, a week after our arrival Janis blew out her back and could barely walk for the next ten weeks. My first experience of panic attacks occurred shortly after that. But two months later I won the $1,000 first prize for a small screenwriting competition, then Janis started to recover, and soon we were into the thick of our Hollywood adventure.
This was kind of that, though on a much smaller scale. There was a detailed panorama sign nearby of the amazing views we would be seeing, were we not right then in a simulation of the surface of Jupiter.
“What do we do?” Janis said. I pointed my hiking stick west toward Fronalpstock, our destination three miles away, and said, “Walk on. The Lord gives; the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
And before we had gone a few hundred feet — as God and my video camera is my witness — the One who cleared a path through an inland sea for a group of Hebrew slaves, of whom Scripture says, “The clouds are the dust of his feet”, began to clear a path through those clouds for a lowly dweeb from Iowa and the beautiful New York woman who was crazy enough to marry him.
God Of Wonders
It began immediately with our very first steps, as the air brightened transfiguration-style, then two large sky-holes opened up above us. It was certainly a possibility that we’d do no better than that, so as we started down the first of many hills we’d encounter, I kept praying under my breath for the Lord not to tease us, but to finish what he’d started.
Stoos Ridge runs like Interstate 80 back in western Iowa, generally straight, but not level, with long stretches of climbs and descents on a narrow but carefully manicured trail. There are no scrambles or technical skills needed — so it’s advertised accurately as ‘family-friendly’ — though there are stretches where I’d sure keep my kids on a leash. (Later I came within a whisker of losing my phone overboard when the rubber grip bracing my phone to our selfie stick decided to “randomly” break off while we were walking close to the edge of a very steep drop-off.)
A quarter-mile later as we crested the first hill, to our left the first triangle of a genuine, bonafide, no-question-about-it mountaintop broke through the clouds, peering at us with one eyeball. This hike was famous for the unending 360-views it awarded of Alpine peaks and the glorious Lake Lucerne. “More please,” we whispered out loud, like famished Oliver. And like a curtain being drawn back, as we kept walking, more was given. More than we could ask or imagine.
Soon we could see the entire expanse of that first mountain, and then all of its family — brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins — all came out to play. And then to our right, the clouds pulled away like cotton candy from the north side, revealing vintage Switzerland — lush, green farmland and meadows stretched for miles.
And just like that, we were in it. We were hiking. That which we were planning for and dreaming about for months was wrapping us up in its arms. We weren’t alone on that ridge by a long shot, and it was interesting to observe — people in a cloud are like people in an elevator; they don’t talk. But suddenly conversations bubbled up everywhere. “Did you see that!?” “Daddy, slow down.” One man that was coming our way was exclaiming, “Oh my God!” over and over again. Just in case he wasn’t worshipping, I said under my breath, “Go with that thought, my friend. Go with that feeling. Go where it takes you.”
One of the great wonders we witnessed was a very human one, and it had many of us talking. As we approached a seriously slanted grassy hillside, you could see straight lines cut across it, as if by a mower. Which was obviously a ridiculous thought. It would be impossible to cut grass there, let alone just plain pointless.
But then as we walked over the next hill, there he was — a dude with a mower on the steepest lawn any human could cut, just a short tumble away from the edge of a thousand-foot cliff. (You can see it on the video.) Even now as I write this and look afresh at the video, I can conceive no possible explanation for it. It’s like modern art. Why?????
Thankfully, as the clouds continued to thin out, something more wondrous than a dude-on-a-mower-on-a-cliffside distracted us, as Lake Lucerne suddenly appeared in a valley below. It became our constant companion for the remainder of the hike. And just when you’d put your camera away thinking you had enough photos, a new angle would appear, or the sun would brighten up just a bit differently. In Utah, there’s an astonishing hike called Angel’s Landing, and when its Swiss doppelganger unexpectedly appeared out of the mist, you had no choice but to stop. I mean, when are you going to come this way again? And if you do, when will it ever look like this again?
The Mystery Of Hiking
It’s one of mysteries of hiking — how you can take just a few steps one way or another and the perspective shifts just enough to adjust your experience. It’s the very embodiment of faith, when you think about it. You take a step even though you’re not entirely sure of what will happen next.
It’s funny how many disparage faith (defined by the Bible as “the assurance of things not seen”), yet they use it all the time. Because if a person insists on knowing something for certain before they do it or believe it, then their life would have to stop.
We use faith for things as simple as eating breakfast (for you don’t send your eggs benedict out for testing before you eat it; yet people have died eating breakfast). Or for things as consequential as getting married (for you can take all the compatibility tests you want, but marriage is largely a relationship where you commit yourself to a person different from you, and neither of you knows for sure what is coming.)
Granted, there is a difference between reasonable faith and blind faith, in that reasonable faith is supported by experience, experiment, and eyewitness testimony (so take the compatibility test, please). But without faith, Walt Disney would not have built his Magic Kingdom. “Our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them,” he said, sounding not unlike Jesus who said faith can move mountains.
Without faith, the Swiss would not have tamed their mountains (literally proving Jesus’s point). Without faith (and a wee bit of stupidity if you ask me), the dude on the mower would not have cut his lawn. Janis and I would not have moved to Los Angeles. Or traveled to Switzerland. Or gotten on the IR26 that morning.
“Faith, hope, and love — live in these three things,” Scripture tells us.
So how do you change your life? You take a step, then see what happens.
Bear Clifton is a pastor, writer and screenwriter. His latest book, “Communion With Christ” is now available through Amazon. His blogs and scripts can be enjoyed at his ministry website: trainyourselfministry.c
om and his writing website: blclifton.com. Bear is also the author of “Ben-Hur: The Odyssey”, and “A Sparrow Could Fall”, all available through Amazon.
Originally published at https://www.trainyourselfministry.com.