Thank you for the great questions you asked about my hike. In today's post, I'll try to answer some of them.
Sweet William the Scot: Can you see your home from way up there at 3700 vertical feet?
Tootsie: Not my home, which is three hours away, but I could see our
Walliser Sonne Hotel down below. For the record: we climbed 3700 feet, but the summit elevation is 8000 feet above sea level.
Lady Vicki: I wonder how the avalanche barriers work.
Tootsie: Avalanche barriers keep avalanches from breaking away by physically holding back the snow. This also prevents the snow's various layers, which build up over a season, from sliding down on top of each other. This specific kind of avalanche barrier is called a
snow rake.
Lady Vicki: [Was] it nearly lunchtime?
Tootsie: No, it was already dinner time!
Hailey and Zaphod and their Lady: Do you feel the difference in the oxygen up there?
Tootsie: Not at that elevation (8000 feet above sea level), but I start feeling it if we go just a little higher (10,000 feet and above). But Mom says, "By golly, I sure felt it!"
Snoopy: Did you really climb all that way?
Tootsie: Yes! Dachshund Daddy picked me up whenever he sensed an objective dachshund hazard, but that mostly happened on the downhill side. For example, on the way down, Dachshund Daddy didn't let me jump down off steep rocks.
The Wieners (and their mom): We'd care about other things, like the smells, searching for critters, and of course finding some kind of foodables.
Tootsie: Spot on! There were countless smells from a wide array of critters and many burrows to investigate. I even tracked a mouse, though I didn't realize it was a mouse. (Mom saw it run away.)
Unfortunately, marmots were nowhere to be seen. Too late in the season?
As for foodables, I've become a big fan of Swiss huckleberries. Mom used to feed me some, and by watching her, I learned how to bite the berries off bushes all on my own!
