The Foggy Rigi Trail

Or when the virtual world meets the real world.

It happens that you meet people only virtually and other times where you write on some message board "Hey! Let's go trekking together.". Last Sunday was such a day. We decided to meet in Arth-Goldau and/or directly on the train to the Rigi Klösterli. And all you need are some smiles and spontaneity. Knowing nearly nothing from the co-trekers but hiking won't be completely wrong. And it was funny. Even if the fog hindered us to have the best view on Lake Lucerne.

For those who don't know where this lake is, its German name is "Vierwaldstättersee". Yep! The English name sounds a little bit strange as in all official Swiss languages it's rather a translation of the German name than something else. But that's similar to Lake Geneva, which is named "Léman" only in French and where Léman comes from the very old "lacus lemanus", 58 BC. But this is another story. So let's go back to our trek!

So, we met on the train. Outside there was a light rain and a lot of fog. The rain stopped shortly after arriving at Rigi Klösterli, where we decided (the two of us who organized the day a little bit) to start our round trip on the Rigi's ridges. Walking up to Rigi First didn't solve the fog problem. One can look at the flowers, at each others, but in all directions, there was nothing but a white and cold wall.
At Chänzeli, we saw once or twice down to Küssnacht SZ (ok, ok, that's also Lake Lucerne! And it shouldn't be mixed-up with Küsnacht ZH which is near Lake Zurich), but never the whole, beautiful panorama down to the three cantons that signed the Federal Charter of 1291.
On the way up to Rigi Staffel, we got one or two windows through the fog and saw Beckenried NW and Sarnen OW.
Up to the top, to the Rigi Kulm, where from we got some beautiful views down to Lake Zug, Lake Lauerz, the town of Schwyz (capital of the canton of Schwyz) and the valley of Muotatal. And high above the fog, to the West, we could even see EMJ in the distance (where EMJ stands for Eiger-Mönch-Jungfrau, some well-known summits in the bernese Alps). Our day was completely saved with the sun roasting our bellies. :)
Down on the north-east ridge and back to Rigi Klösterli where a big cold beer was waiting for me (Yeah! My co-hikers took something else).

The whole tour is doable with flip-flops (we saw some guys wearing this kind of shoes), but some better sneakers or hiking shoes are recommended. It would have been better on a day with better weather (in this case, we might have had a bunch more tourists with flip-flops), but the most important to me was the lot of fun we had.

Thanks to Carolina, Mirjam and Mathias for sharing this day!