Day 20: Hike to Silleren! Part I
I had this day off and I decided that I wanted to take a hike. I went with another summer vollie, Cate and we decided to hike up the Silleren alp. We left around 10am and began our journey by walking down from Our Chalet to the bottom of the mountain. We followed a path that was right next to a coursing turquoise river surrounded by pine trees. The path was wide and made of gravel. I could see that some of the pine trees had fallen as a result of the recent storm, and though I was tempted to walk across the fallen trees that were suspended over the river I knew it wasn't a good idea haha. We also passed a bathtub on this path haha...it was really random but a good photo opportunity haha.

We followed the signs to the adventure park. We passed the outdoor adventure park and I could see some wires up above. There was also a bridge that passed through the clearing. We would be venturing to the adventure park soon as a part of training. Afterwards, we came to a wooden bridge, crossed it and climbed up a hill next to a chalet. We looked at some signs and only saw a road so we decided to backtrack to the path we were on. We continued on the gravel road next to the river until the path opened up to a barn surrounded by fields. We made some cow friends before we decided to follow a small dirt path that ran behind the barn. We made our way around some clean-up of fallen trees up a small hill back into a grove of pine trees though we were no longer next to the river.

We contiunued our hike across the valley until we finally reached the base of Silleren. The view was beautiful; the clear blue sky outlined the snowy mountains. As we ascended the mountain, I could more clearly see the avalanche barriers high up on the mountains. We reached a steep hill next to a small stream. The hill was filled with tall grass and mountain flowers.

Then, we reached a road! We followed the road upwards near fields until we saw a path. We followed the path to an old chalet which had a "Wanderweg" sign near it (Wanderweg stands for hiking trail). We saw a small dirt trail near the chalet so we had a choice to make: 1) take the road or 2) follow the trail.

We decided to follow the trail. We followed the trail across the field and at an upward incline. The trail suddenly ended so we thought that the road would be curving back up in the distance. We started travelling in the direction of where we thought the road would be. We spent an hour crossing fields, small streams and through small patches of trees. We kept going until we came to the edge of the hill that had a sharp drop down to some water below. We took a small break nearby the gorge and decided that we were lost and could not go any further. Unfortunately Cate and I have the same sense of direction which is not awesome and the maps stayed in our backpacks the entire hike haha.

Then, we spotted a road down the hill that we were on (which was clearly someone's property haha). We descended the hill and made it to the road next to a chalet. We decided to follow the road until we reached the top!
 We were getting tired and the summit seemed far away. The real question running through our minds was: Will we actually make it to the top of Silleren?