Hike to the SAC Sustli Hostel in the Meien Valley

Another new valley... I have never been in this valley before. It connects the Reuss Valley with the Hasli Valley across the Susten Pass, another of those fabulous high alpine winding roads and favourites of the motorcyclists.

Here is the starting point of our hike in the Meien Valley (behind me and up!) The road continues over the Susten Pass.

The hike we mapped out consisted of a steep and challenging uphill and an even more challenging downhill with a most amazing Alpine high trail in between! The satisfying one-hour uphill climb to the Swiss Alpine Club (SAC) hostel we did in the shady side of the mountain which made the ascent quite enjoyable.

The 6-km hike took us over three hours because of the steep descent

Start of the hike. It took exactly one hour to hike the 350m up to the Hostel. It was quite enjoyable.

Here is a great place for our second or third breakfast!

At about this spot where we stopped for a picnic, I experienced my first rock "slide". The noise was like an explosion as a big rock broke off from the hillside not 10 meters away and tumbled down quite near us. The night before it had snowed up here, and the warming air loosens the rocks. You really don't know which way you should run, if at all....

Some more tricky climbing and we are almost at the top

This Swiss Alpine Club Hostel is popular with families and there are several opportunities for learning to rock climb up here.The hostel's location is on a fabulous sunny terrace with panoramic views up and down the Meien Valley.

This view is looking East toward the Reuss Valley

This view is looking East toward the Reuss Valley. This is an Alpine Chough in flight.

This view is Southwest to the Susten Pass

I was particularly fascinated with the other Swiss Alpine Hostel we could see just above the Susten Pass, about 7 km as the crow flies. It lies at 2800m above some fabulous glaciers, and I hope to be fit enough one day to hike up there.

Tierbergli Hostel

According to route markers, this hike should have taken less than three hours, but we found that the trail conditions were a bit difficult, mostly due to streams running along the trails, so we had to tread carefully, especially on the downhill section, which was very steep in some places and the trail quite rutted and overgrown. Our time to hike this was 3.5 hours.

But the fantastic view more than made up for any difficult terrain.

AND WE SAW WILDLIFE! Especially the beautiful Golden Eagle which I actually saw from the top flying quite close below us, but by the time I had my camera ready and zoomed in, he was already up high.

But the Marmot held still, probably because he didn't want to be seen by the eagle.

The steep descent was very interesting (even though difficult to navigate) as the vegetation is quite varied from bracken to heather to moor and various grasses. It's too bad that we had to rush our way down, as there are only two buses in and out of this valley, and we just barely made it down to catch the last one back out.