The Road to Bivio

This time we got an early start Fri­day morn­ing, borne along by our proprietress’s lovely break­fast, warm wishes, and grand­moth­erly advice on cross­ing the moun­tains. But almost imme­di­ately we were way­laid, though in a won­der­ful way, by dis­cov­er­ing a church dat­ing back to the year 800 just a short way beyond and below the hotel. Nearby was a lit­tle wooden chalet, hous­ing the care­taker and his fam­ily, enveloped in gar­dens of flow­ers and veg­eta­bles, guarded by ducks and geese. The church itself was a big square inside, about 8 rough-hewn wooden pews, a stone floor, and very old mural paint­ings in the three apses up front. The apse with the altar had the most paint­ings, and it looked strik­ingly Eastern—a big Christ Pan­tokra­tor in the mid­dle flanked on either side by the saints, in a bold and straight­for­ward style. The wooden ceil­ing was dec­o­rated with designs in black paint. We were enchanted in an evan­gel­i­cal way and said our morn­ing prayers there.

The con­trast then was both amus­ing and strik­ing: as we pro­ceeded down then up the moun­tain­side we walked past an enor­mous pul­ley sys­tem dredg­ing gravel out of the river bot­tom and dump­ing it into a tower-shaped con­tainer; then a hydro power plant; then the strangely aes­thetic sculp­tures of the insu­la­tors inside the elec­tri­cal substation.

It was a steep haul up the mountainside—not much for­ward progress in kilo­me­ters, but about 400 m up along a very old road, now a hik­ing path, but prob­a­bly once the main road lead­ing up to the pass (i.e., greatly increas­ing the prob­a­bil­ity that Luther walked along it too). It took us to Mon, about as enchant­ing a Swiss vil­lage as you could hope for. All the signs were in Roman­isch, cows wan­dered down the streets, flow­ers sprawled out of pots on the doorsteps of houses dat­ing back to the 17th cen­tury. Bees were hard at work every­where, espe­cially on the many vari­eties of this­tles. On the way to neigh­bor­ing Salouf we saw lentic­u­lar clouds—clouds in the shape of a lens (sen­si­bly enough) that form over very tall moun­tain peaks—and the outer rim of one fly­ing saucer-shaped cloud was edged in the whole rain­bow spec­trum of col­ors. Cre­ation is some amaz­ing stuff.

Along the way we also got to meet some locals out enjoy­ing the lovely day. One woman liv­ing high up in a moun­tain­side vil­lage was col­lect­ing tiny wild red berries that we didn’t rec­og­nize; she mixes them in with fruit com­pote for their health­ful prop­er­ties. She con­firmed that we were on one of the old­est roads lead­ing up to the pass, and pil­grims still reg­u­larly pass by along here, even though it’s not noted as being a pil­grim route as such. Another cou­ple of daytrip­pers did us the great honor of address­ing in Swiss Ger­man first before we had to explain that we could only speak “Schrift­deutsch” (writ­ten Ger­man, as they call stan­dard text­book Ger­man here), and warned us that the weather was going to turn soon. And it was true that as we came around one mountain’s shel­ter to the other side, the wind picked up fear­somely and we could see clouds start pil­ing up at the peak.

I men­tioned yes­ter­day that Luther didn’t have to deal with car traf­fic; he also didn’t have to deal with mod­ern time sched­ules. His job was to get to Rome and back, how­ever long it took. We, how­ever, have exactly 70 days and no wig­gle room for error. And yet, error arises. The error of the day wasn’t as dra­matic as that of the day before (for­tu­nately): but the fact remained, as we grew to real­ize, we’d need two days to make the hike we’d planned to make in only one. It’s a good 34 km from Alvaschein to Bivio, and more impor­tantly up 700 m, as the crow flies, but trails do not go as the crow flies, and the actual climb­ing dis­tance would’ve been around 1500 m. Not to men­tion that said walk­ing trail goes up over the top of a moun­tain on the way to Bivio—right into the heart of the wind and clouds fast advanc­ing on the peaks. And we had already learned the les­son that walk­ing along the vir­tu­ally shoul­der­less and snaking moun­tain roads is not wise. If we had no end of time, we could have waited it out for bet­ter weather. But we don’t.

So—all of this is pre­am­ble to say—we went as far as we rea­son­ably could in a day, to Savognin, and then… took a bus. Up up up we climbed to Bivio. Along the way we wit­nessed an accident—the dri­ver appeared to have fallen asleep at the wheel and col­lided with a road bar­rier; his airbags popped out and gave him a bloody nose but no worse, praise God—reinforcing the con­vic­tion that road­side walk­ing is to be avoided at all costs.

Our first stop in Bivio was the infor­ma­tion office to find out the next day’s weather report: not good, high of 2 degrees Cel­cius in Bivio at 1700 m (Sep­ti­mer Pass is 2300 m) and chance of rain and snow. We decided to wait till the next morn­ing before mak­ing a final decision.

A con­clud­ing note for the culi­nar­ily curi­ous: our hotel is region­ally known for its spe­cialty “ragout di mar­motta” (mar­mot stew), since mar­mots are favorite old-time moun­tain food, hiber­nat­ing as they do so you can har­vest them like turnips. We asked the wait­ress what she thought and, as this is now as much Italian-speaking as German-speaking Italy, she replied, “molto di grasso” (“pretty fatty”). So we passed it up and set­tled for a less exotic dinner.