I get so excited when I start to see berries on the trail.

And it’s even more fun when I am walking with someone who shares my enthusiasm for picking them.

This past summer, we found blueberries, blackberries and raspberries on the Via Alpina.

And blackberries were absolutely everywhere along our summer hikes in England.

Such treasure!

Berry picking was a thread that ran through hiking trips from July to September this year.

I first sent Simon down the lane with his cousin in July to grab berries for a crumble after dinner.

Then Anna and I slowed everyone down with our constant raspberry picking on the first few days of the Via Alpina.

Once she left, I had some new berry picking comrades show up in my sister-in-law, Koko and my friend Jermaine. They were the first ones to spot the tiny wild blueberries along the path.

Our last week in Switzerland, we stayed on a farm and picked blackberries every morning to have in our yogurt for breakfast.

In September, I hiked with my parents and my dad and I picked berries together. They were absolutely everywhere by early September in our area. And then we met friends in the Lake District who were also game to stop for picking blackberries.

Koko even filled her water bottle with them to take back to her partner who couldn’t hike with us. I love her for that! It’s not enough just to pick and enjoy the berries yourself, but also you want to spread that berry love.

My sister, brother and I first picked blackberries with my grandparents in Arkansas. They lived out in the country. As kids, we would go stay with them in June and pick berries down the road from their house. Then my grandmother would make blackberry pie and blackberry jam.

Blackberry pie was always my favorite dessert growing up. I would request it on my birthday instead of cake.

Our early blackberry picking days were the inspiration for my sister’s restaurant when she opened it in 2012: Blackberry Market.

And now my brother has just opened one in North Little Rock, Arkansas. (You should definitely go visit.)

Though it can add a considerable amount of time to your hike, finding wild berries is always a good excuse for a stop on the trail.

Now, on these winter days,

when I walk by the sleeping blackberry bushes,

I imagine them full with berries again.

When the time comes, I’ll be ready with my pail,

and hopefully I’ll have a friend around who is willing to stop and share the joy picking blackberries.

Mini Walking Stories is a project I’m doing this month to catalog a fabulous year of walking. During December, I’m inviting you to come along with me on one of the walks I took in 2022. Read more stories here. Or subscribe to get stories to your inbox here.

The post Mini Walking Stories: Picking Blackberries appeared first on Alison Chino.

Taido and I say to each other all the time that we want to keep hiking well into our old age.

Then this summer, only a few days into the Via Alpina, I was starting to think thoughts like:

I think this might be my last serious mountain climb.

It’s time for me to stick to the lower level routes.

All morning I had been counting steps up the mountain.

We could see the pass ahead of us and even better, we could spot that there was a restaurant on top, so we knew we were looking forward to a substantial break.

When we finally reached the top, I collapsed into a chair while everyone went inside to order.

Just grab me one of what you’re having, I said to Taido. I couldn’t take another step.

The restaurant on Hahnenmoos Pass turned out to be a whole beautiful resort, with comfy chairs and sun loungers.

While I sat in my barely-conscious state, I watched an older couple come up the hill.

They were taking their time, but they were not struggling. You could tell that this was not their first rodeo. I imagine they were life-long mountain climbers.

They walked inside and came back out with two espressos, which they sat down and quickly drank. Then they fell back into their chairs and fell asleep.

I don’t know where they were headed next or what their plans were for the afternoon. But in my book, they were winning life.

For the next part of the trail, they would be fueled up and rested.

I pointed them out to Taido and Anna.

Hey y’all, I said, Look…

Hashtag Life Goals. 

Mini Walking Stories is a project I’m doing this month to catalog a fabulous year of walking. During December, I’m inviting you to come along with me on one of the walks I took in 2022. Read more stories here. Or subscribe to get stories to your inbox here.

The post Mini Walking Stories: Life Goals appeared first on Alison Chino.

Breakfast Spread at Hotel Wildhorn in Lauenen

The Swiss Mountain Hut Breakfast might be my favorite Swiss Meal.

A close cousin to German breakfast, the offerings are both predictable and plentiful.

There will always be muesli, which is kind of like granola, but without any sweetener.

A staple of the Swiss breakfast table, muesli has dried oats, raisins and seeds.

I eat it with yogurt, but some folks use milk or even chocolate milk.

Other regular offerings in the Swiss Mountain Hut Breakfast include:

Dry cereals

Boiled eggs: you can have them soft-boiled or hard-boiled. You actually make them yourself, usually in a boiler that is set up on the breakfast buffet.

Pastries: croissants, pain au chocolat, muffins

Fresh bread with toppings: butter, jam, honey, nutella

Various cheeses (Emmental, Gruyère) and meats (ham, salami)

Yogurt

Fruit

Juice and milk

Hot chocolate, tea and coffee

I love the Swiss Mountain Hut Breakfast. I prefer it immensely to the traditional English Breakfast, or even American Breakfast, both of which I find to be too heavy to eat just before hiking.

I eat my yogurt and muesli first, then a soft-boiled egg and toast. I end with a couple of pieces of fruit, which I often have to just stick in my pocket, because Taido is ready to go.

It may be difficult to hike the Via Alpina, but at least you are well-fueled for the day.

The post Mini Walking Stories: Swiss Mountain Hut Breakfast appeared first on Alison Chino.

I know I’ve mentioned it once or twice but the hiking trails of the Via Alpina (and really throughout Switzerland) are impossibly steep.

Here’s how most days of our Swiss hiking days unfold:

You crane your neck all morning looking up at the next pass, hiking the relentlessly uphill trail and willing your body to just please go one. more. step.

When you finally reach the top of the pass, the relief is palpable. Your legs are still shaking from the workout but you are delighted to be on top of the world, especially if the sky is clear, because ohmygoodness THE VIEWS.

But the relief is short-lived, because thirty minutes after you start down, your knees are screaming at you for slamming them into the ground step after step after step.

You finally hobble all the way to your hostel where you have a seat, a drink, a shower, some food and some sleep before you wake up to do it again. Seriously, it’s both AMAZING and AMAZINGLY HARD.

And that goes for the uphill AND the downhill.

But it’s the uphill struggle that we tell people to prepare for on hikes in the mountains.

For months, I send out emails and texts encouraging folks to go walk the hills closest to them. Go up and down them as many times as you possibly can.  For people who don’t live near any hills, I suggest finding some stairs or at the very least, a stair master machine at the gym.

But no matter how many stairs you force yourself to climb, you probably won’t reach the equivalent of what you will climb in a day on the Via Alpina.

When you’re staring at the side of a mountain and wondering how much further it is to the top, the answer is always: further than you think.

So how do you tap into the place deep within yourself that pushes you to keep going further than you’ve trained to go?

I don’t know how other folks do it, but being a person that does not excel at “will power,” I have developed a system for how to bypass the part of my brain that is telling me to quit.

I’ve been flinging my body up mountains for a long time, and I’ve lost count of the number of times that I have reached the place where I feel that I cannot take another step.

And this is what I do.

I tell myself I don’t have to climb all the way to the top. I only have to take 100 more steps.

So I count to 100 steps, and then I stop and catch my breath for a count of 10.

And then I repeat.

I take 100 more steps, then stop and take 5 deep breaths. In (1) and out (2), in (3) and out (4)…until I get to 10.

And then again. And again.

When 100 steps begins to feel insurmountable, I drop to 50.

I reduce the number until it is the amount of steps to which my brain will say yes.

In the Colorado Rockies, where the altitude is high and my lungs cannot seem to catch the air I need, I have reduced the number of steps all the way to 10. 10 steps, 10 breaths.

A slow plod.

When I am doing counts of 100, I stop for a longer break after 5-10 sets. Drink a little water. Have a bite of an energy bar.

And this is how I get up the mountain, in little bite-sized chunks.

Importantly, the counting takes my concentration.

It fills the space that is usually buzzing with all my thoughts.

Like:

When will it end?

Whose idea was this trip?

Why didn’t I train more ahead of time?

I think everyone else here is faster than me.

Instead of this pattern of unhelpful thoughts, all I can think is: one step, two steps, three steps…

Once I start counting steps, I can even get in a sort of meditative zone. I’m just stepping, counting and breathing.

I love walking with others because of how the time passes. Sometimes someone is telling me a story while we’re walking and I don’t even notice how many miles we’ve gone. But on the Via Alpina, there comes a point when the trail is so steep and you’ve been at it for so long that no one is talking anymore. You can’t spare the oxygen for talking, so you are just left alone in your own head.

This summer I began to share my counting system with some of the others who might have been similarly struggling to climb the Swiss Alps.

A few of the gals took this system of counting steps and made it their own, developing routines of how many steps to take, when to stop for a water break and when to stop for food.

It gave me great joy to see that the system that I have used with success since I was a teenager was also helpful to others. If you ever find yourself on the side of a mountain thinking that you just cannot go any further, I encourage you to give it a try.

PS. Here’s a little video Taido took of the steep ascent of switchbacks getting up to Bunderchrinde pass (2382 meters) on the day we hiked from Adelboden to Kandersteg on the Via Alpina. You can see Anna and I waaaay below, making our way slowly up the mountain. And I can promise you that I am counting steps.

Mini Walking Stories is a project I’m doing this month to catalog a fabulous year of walking. During December, I’m inviting you to come along with me for a few minutes on one of the walks I took in 2022. Read more stories here.

The post Mini Walking Stories: Counting Steps Up A Mountain appeared first on Alison Chino.

When I look at my watch and see that it is past 4pm and I have been wiping the sweat from my face since the morning, I start hoping that the end of my walking day is in sight.

I can almost taste the cold pint waiting for me in the beer garden.

I’m already picturing it: the weight of the glass in my hand, the tickle of the foam on my lip, and the refreshing first gulp.

It’s a signal to my brain that I have made it the length of the walk, that I did what I started out to do that morning.

CHEERS! We did it!

Or shouts of Prost! Salut! Salud!

On the Via Alpina, even after feeling hot all day, I would cool down enough to need another layer, especially because I was still outside, always outside…on a veranda, a porch, an overhanging balcony or simply spread out in a field of picnic tables with umbrellas.

Of course it goes without saying that this tradition is even better with friends, everyone sighing with relief and laughing about the events that have unfolded along the way.

Countless trail tales have been told around the drinks at the end of the day.

No one saw me, but I fell on that last set of rock steps down the hill.

Did you see the lady with the cows?

What about the refrigerator in the middle of nowhere selling cheese? 

Wait! I missed a cheese fridge?

On a cold hike in England, I have my end-of-day lager while sitting as close to the heat of a pub fire as possible.

Or on a winter hike in Germany, the smell of cinnamon and cloves, the tell-tale sign that gluhwein is on offer, will often hit your senses as soon as you walk into a bar. I love to warm up with a mug of gluhwein when it’s been a cold hike, but I will forever associate mulled wine with walking around Christmas Markets in Tübingen, where you can bring your own mug to fill it at different stands as you wander from stall to stall admiring all the treasures on offer. Strolling through a German Christmas Market is a different kind of walk, but no less pleasurable than a wander in the woods.

But in my humble opinion, no winter warm up can beat a Weissbier outside an Alpine hut on a hot summer’s day.

However, not everyone shares my love for a beer at the end of a walk, so it’s been fun for me to discover what other folks like. I’ve introduced beer-averse walkers to ciders with success. On the Camino, lots of the ladies opted for sangria. My friend Diane likes a Nestea, Simon enjoys a ginger beer and my dad will never say no to a sparkling lemonade.

It really doesn’t matter what the beverage is–sometimes it can even be finishing the tea flask in the car on the way home–but much like the picnic lunch, sitting down for a drink at the end of a long ramble is a necessary component of a great day out walking.

Mini Walking Stories is a project I’m doing this month to catalog a fabulous year of walking. During December, I’m inviting you to come along with me for a few minutes on one of the walks I took in 2022. Read more stories here.

The post Mini Walking Stories: The Drink at The End of a Walk appeared first on Alison Chino.

How Always Stop For A Swim Became My New Walking Motto

We had been walking all day along the water, staring out at the crystal blue sky and sea on our left as we headed north.

For most of the bright blue June day, we were fully in the sun, but a consistent breeze had lessoned its heat.

Still, the more we walked, the hotter we became.

Making frequent stops is a theme of my time on the Camino and this day was no exception. You can only pass so many inviting seaside cafes with beach umbrellas before you have to stop at one. We stopped at three.

You could say we were having a leisurely first day on the trail, which is always a good way to begin.

But even with the stopping, by the end, we were all hot and tired, so we kicked off our shoes on the beach and ran out into the water.

And wow! There is just nothing more refreshing than cold water on tired legs.

Afterwards, we all spread out on rocks by the sea and nodded off like seals in the sunshine. It was perfect.

A couple of days later, after we had left the seaside, and we had been walking for a much longer stretch without the benefit of the sea breeze, we crossed over a small river on an old medieval bridge. On the other side of the bridge, we were able to access the river. Again, we jumped in the water and rinsed off the heat and sweat of the day before drying off on the grass by the river, taking a quick nap before wandering on into the town where we were staying.

This became a habit on this trip: jumping into water at or near the end of the day. I started keeping an eye out for places to stop for a swim on my map. It was unseasonably hot in Europe this past summer, so we found that even if you only soaked your feet and splashed your face, it made a huge difference to how you felt for those last few steps of the day.

When the rest of our group joined us halfway through our time on the Portuguese Camino, we immediately introduced them to the delight of jumping into water on a hot day. And if you crossed over some refreshing water earlier in the day, you could still soak a bandana or a buff to wipe your face.

Towards the end of the day, sometimes folks were in a hurry to just get on to the hotel or hostel, but often the last mile or so when you are entering a town is the hottest, because you’re walking on the pavement. A cold soak can be that little extra boost you need for turning the final leg from a slog into a victory stroll.

And so I would always stop for a swim when I saw a perfect spot. A cold, flowing river made my ankles and knees happy with me again, at least for a little while.

Four of the places we stayed on the Portuguese Camino had swimming pools, which was an equally delightful way to finish the day with a swim.

And one day, an especially lovely hostel host arranged for us to all be carried off in cars to the beach to splash in the water and quickly forget how hot we were.

Of course you must go to the beach! he said to me.

Yes, absolutely we must! I replied involuntarily.

And it was the most refreshing plunge of all the refreshing plunges. It had been such a hot day, and the sea immediately turned angst into laughter.

Though none of my other trips this year were as hot as the Camino in June, I still kept jumping into water.

I jumped into several lakes in Switzerland on hot days and soaked my weary bones in some Swiss streams. Pure bliss after all the ups and downs!

Then, in the Lake District, though it was quite cold and even rainy, there were two occasions where a few brave souls and I ended the day’s walk by jumping into a lake. I cannot even explain the urge to do this. Maybe it is the incredible relief that the freezing cold water provides for my joints. Or maybe I am just wildly curious about the spike in popularity of cold water swimming. But I think there must be at least some motivation having to do with my muscle memory around how delightful it was to end the summer walks in the water that produced my desire to jump in a cold lake after the Lake District rambles.

And so it came to pass that both my first walk of the summer in June and my last walk of the season in September ended with splashes in the water. Two very different days, but they both involved a good walk with friends with a swim at the end.

Last week I went for a swim in a nearby pool that has a sauna for your post-swim warm up (yes, please!), and while I was doing frosty laps in the pool, I was gratefully remembering of all my summer dips. I was filled-to-the-brim thankful for everyone who was willing to pause and hop in the water along with me!

Sometimes the only thing keeping you from a good swim is a fellow adventurer. The folks I most often hike with (Chino boys) are hard pressed to stop at all on a hike, much less for something as lengthy as a swim.

Unlace boots? Change clothes? Dig out a towel?

Taido Chino cannot be having that kind of delay in the schedule.

So I consider it a great accomplishment that this past summer I managed to coax him into a lake, not once, but twice!

Like I said, it was an unusually hot summer in Europe.

Mini Walking Stories is a project I’m doing this month to catalog a fabulous year of walking. During December, I’m inviting you to come along with me for a few minutes on one of the walks I took in 2022. Read more stories here.

The post Mini Walking Stories: Soak in all the Rivers + Jump in all the Lakes appeared first on Alison Chino.

Mini Walking Stories is a project I’m doing this month to catalog a fabulous year of walking. Every day during December, I’m going to choose one photo and invite you to come along with me for a few minutes on one of the walks I took in 2022. Read more stories here.

The Massenlager

It’s a bit like Grandma’s Feather Bed, only without the hound dogs and pig.

We didn’t get much sleep, but we had a lot of fun.

At least I think we did.

The Massenlager is the Swiss German word for where you sleep in an alpine hut.

It’s not just a hostel, it’s a room with one or two long beds where you huddle up with your friends (and a few strangers) after a long day of hiking.

You’re allotted a pillow the size of a tea cup and one scratchy wool blanket. So between the fabric-covered bed and the blanket, you use a sleeping bag liner. The liner is a small, lightweight sleeping bag that you carry in your pack.

If you move around a lot in your sleep, you might find the sleeping bag liner to be similar to a straitjacket, especially once it twists and tangles around your body while you try to sleep.

A Massenlager usually holds 20-30 people, often with one long bed on the bottom and another long one above. With that number of folks in the room, the odds are pretty decent that someone is going to snore, loudly. So ear plugs are a must. I also recommend melatonin.

On my first night in a Massenlager in Switzerland, I was lamenting how little sleep I thought I would get, when my sister, who joined us for our first few days on the Via Alpina, made an interesting perspective-shifting point:

On a long-haul flight, you would pay a lot of money for this much space to sleep. 

This was  a strangely helpful thought.

I still didn’t get that much sleep, but I did begin to enter the Massenlagers at night with gratitude for the warm, dry space to stretch out. After miles and miles of marching up (and down) mountains, I was thankful for every hour of rest.

I actively decided not to be jealous of those who could fall right asleep in the Massenlager.

I found myself actually thankful for snores and heavy breathing around me, because it meant that at least someone was getting good sleep. (Maybe that someone could carry my backpack the next day.)

And then one night, when we walked into the youth hostel in Grindelwald and were assigned to rooms with bunk beds, all of a sudden the luxury of having an entire twin mattress all to myself felt like winning the lottery!

It was like we had checked into the Ritz-Carlton! I was several whole feet away from the next person, and could flop about in my straitjacket liner without disturbing anyone else!

Oh the deliciously deep sleep that I got that night!

The post Mini Walking Stories: Massenlager appeared first on Alison Chino.

Mini Walking Stories is a project I’m doing this month to catalog what has been an AMAZING year of walking. Every day during December, I’m going to choose one photo and invite you to come along with me for a few minutes on one of the walks I took in 2022. Read more stories here.

Fear of the Highest Heights (on the Via Alpina)

The scenery is more than magnificent from the top of Sefinenfurgge Pass. At 2594 meters high (8510 feet), you can see for miles.

However, as I sat on the narrow bit of rock that makes up the shoulder of this gorgeous Alpine pass, I was not focused on how beautiful it was.

I snapped a few photos. I celebrated with everyone else that we had made it through the hardest climb of our day. I gulped down some water and ate a snack. I might have even laughed.

But everything I was doing outwardly was serving to (unsuccessfully) distract myself from my laser focus on one thing:

My fear of going down.

I have a long-standing fear of heights. I dug my heels in deep when my dad tried to get me to do a ropes course at summer camp, and then again when peer pressure was strong to jump off a high dive at the pool.

But over the years, I have managed to overcome a lot of the ways my fear of heights could have stopped me from enjoying some of my favorite views. I can climb to the tops of hills and mountains, but when I am near a drop, I sometimes feel like I lose control of my legs. I begin to shake, and if I am already quite tired from hiking, the shaking feels an awful lot like almost falling.

And so I freeze.

The day before, we had come down from a steep pass that I had not been expecting. Navigating an endless number of ladder-like stairs was the only way to get down off the mountain, and on the sides of the ladders, there were sheer rock-faced drops. I could not look down, so I ended up turning around and going down backwards so that I could look up instead. My friend Jermaine, who has known me for more than twenty years, happened to be behind me. And my sister-in-law was right behind her. They took my poles, so I could use my hands and feet to crawl backwards down the mountain. Even after I got off the ladders, we found ourselves on a lot of trails that seemed precariously near the edge of a ravine, so I was a little more wobbly than usual for a good part of the day.

I had been a bit caught off guard by how much the descent had freaked me out, so at our hostel that night, I researched (probably unwisely) how many more of these ladder-lined passes we would be crossing on the Via Alpina. From my bunk in the Alpine hut, I discovered that we had a very similar ascent and descent the very next day.

The great thing about how exhausting it is to hike straight up into the Swiss Alps is that I had to use energy just to step one foot forward in front of the other that I might have otherwise spent in dreading this descent from Sefinenfurgge Pass. But the closer I got to the pass, the more I remembered how I had frozen at the top of the steps the day before.

I might not have stopped on the pass, but I was shaking too much when I reached the top not to sit down for at least a moment. Every second I sat at the top served to enlarge my dread of going back down the other side. The series of steps and ladders that made up the descent were right in my line of sight, and I knew that I wanted to get them behind me sooner than later.

So as soon as I felt that I had caught my breath, I started to make my way down. This time I put my poles away ahead of time and didn’t even try to start out facing forward. I turned around right at the top and began to crawl backwards again. Looking up, I noticed that my precious friend Jermaine had come along right behind me. Conscious of my fear from the previous day, she was ready with her calming presence.

You can see Jermaine in the above photo standing there behind me. You can’t see me in front of her going down backwards, and you can’t see her face, watching me and encouraging me: You have two more steps before the end of this set and then to your left, a new set begins. We have about ten of these left. There is a bend to your right in the next step. The rope you are holding ends in about two feet. You’re doing great. The next rope is right behind you to your right. You can hang on to it for the next four steps. You’re almost there.

Like this, she talked me all the way down.

Truth be told, this descent was not as bad as the one from the previous day.

But it didn’t matter in my head. Once I knew I would be going up and down ladders again, I became very afraid.

And also I was exhausted. We had climbed over 3500 feet to get to Sefinenfurgge Pass, and we would descend that same number again before we stopped that day.

During our time on the Via Alpina, Taido and I noticed that the grueling climbs and descents of each day meant that folks had less resources to hold themselves together to face other things, like hunger or thirst, or relationship dynamics, or a little fear of heights. When you push folks to their edge, you perhaps shouldn’t be surprised at what comes out.

But in the end, my moments on, what are for me, the highest of heights turned out to be a confirmation that I am going to be ok, and that I walk the scary ridges and descents the same way I have walked so many paths before me, one step at a time, and with a little help from my friends.

The post Mini Walking Stories: Fear of the Highest Heights appeared first on Alison Chino.