It was very bad weather, with clouds hanging low in the mountains. My body begged to stay inside, but I still put on my rain jacket and bravest smile and aimed for my steepest mountain gradient.

There I found a totally different world than I was used to. After the first hundred meter climbing, I already got absorbed by the cloud, limiting my sight till a few meters all around me. Even though I had climbed that mountain for years in a row, I did not recognise anything that I saw.

At world’s end

The world seemed to end right in front of me. Purely based on the arrow on my gps-compass, I made my way up to my plots, my inner compass helplessly getting lost more with every step I put. Luckily my gps did not worry about the mist. It aimed without hesitation directly to my destination.

The god of the mountains…

When I had been hiking for almost two hours in this dream landscape, I saw the god of the mountains loom up in the distance. A horned creature, looking at me from afar, guiding me to where I had to go. I decided I had started hallucinating, until I realised it was just a curious reindeer checking out what this human was looking for up there on this rainy day.

Alpine hawkweed collecting clouds

 When I finally reached my plots, I had survived the worst. Slowly, the sun started piercing through the clouds, first only faintly and then finally revealing piece by piece the beautiful views it had been hiding.

I can hike in this mountains a thousand times, they never cease to amaze.