This afternoon we checked into a famous 131 year old hotel, high above the collective valley communities of Grimentz, St. Luc, Mission and Ayer, called the Hotel Weisshorn, perched on the edge of a cliff with exceptional 360 degrees views. Some of the hallways have the original paint scheme, while the rooms have been re-panelled. The floors are wooden planks and interior stairways are original stone.
Furnishiings for the rooms are spare and showers are located in one room modified for the purpose. WC is located, one for each floor, on the mid stairwell halfway between floors. There is a lovely outdoor terrace at the hotel entrance, where we sat in the sun enjoying the views this afternoon along with the other 8 rooms of guests for this evening. As we eat dinner we watch the street lights in each of the small villages light up like Christmas tree lights or brunt embers in the farthest reaches across the valley.
The village of Ayer was an unexpected treat because we had not planned to climb thru this village on our way to the Weisshorn. So many old wooden timber houses, it was hard to decide which to photograph. Situated on a slope just below the long hanging valley, atop which they grazed the milk cows, the town was crowded with granaries and barns for winter housing of the live stock. If you haven’t noticed, geraniums are de rigeur in all forms and bunches in planters, hanging baskets and pots.
As in every village the steepled church stands prominent and centered on the narrow streets. This community must have raised considerable grain in the alps above because they had a still functional large waterwheel that in days past drove a large flour mill. Water for the mill’s wheel was piped from alps above the village.
Because it had rained the night before, the morning hike started in the rising fog of dampness in the valley. The hike was necessarily steep and we spent much of the morning in deep forest. Slowly the clouds revealed the surrounding mountains and just about the time we stopped for lunch we first heard and then a short while later were treated to seeing a Swiss Air Force air show. Two F-18’s did repeated barrel rolls and loop-to-loops in and out of the clouds above us. When you couldn’t see them you could still tell their aerobatic maneuvers by the tremendous sounds from the accelerations they produced.
