Flumserberg: Chruz to Prodalp

The second of two short mountain walks we did while staying in Flumserberg, Switzerland. Having arrived in Flumserberg on the Tuesday, on Wednesday we had a go at skiing (not very successful in my case) and so on Thursday, our final day, we decided to go back to walking again. Once more we took advantage of the "Heidi Wanderticket" and after a quick lunch at Maschgenkamm we took the cable car back down to Tannenboden, then the chair lift up to Chruz, and started our walk from there.

 Again the route was very well marked with pink and white poles along the way. Although I'm not sure 100% of skiers realised these were meant for walkers, not skiers - but that was only really an issue right at the start. After leaving the chair lift station and passing the "Bergrestaurant" at Chruz, we crossed over the ski slope there - a bit like crossing a busy road - and then happily found our route diverted away from all the skiers, through a very peaceful patch of Alpine woodland.

The woods made for very pleasant walking, albeit that the path here was a bit steep in places, and obviously the trees compromised the views a bit... but instead we had other sights in the foreground to keep us interested - like the cascading icicles above, and occasionally mysterious animal tracks in the otherwise unperturbed pristine white snow.

After a while we emerged from the woods, and the path followed a largely open section of the mountainside, from where once again we had marvellous uninterrupted views of the Alps. We did eventually have a piste running along side us as well, but it was a relatively quiet one and it didn't bother us too much.

Like our walk the other day, we had a wonderful feeling of isolation here, and huge blue skies overhead.

One of the reasons we'd wanted to walk to Prodalp is that there was a sledging area there with a good incline of slope, and the absence of any skiers (or many other sledgers for that matter) making it a bit safer to have a go. Erika had a portable flat sheet sledge thingy whether so she gave that a few runs down the slope. Although she had just as much fun lying in the snow and making snow angels.

Having had a bit of a nasty fall yesterday (not even while skiing - just walking through a car park!) I declined the offer to have a go on the sledge.

From Prodalp, we got the cable car down to Tannenheim, which partly follows the route of the much longer sledging run (we had just been on the practice slope). This both looked fun, and slightly hair raising - it appears there were actually quite steep drops at one side of the route for some of the way.

On arrival in Tannenheim we were pleased to discover there was a bus - apparently completely free of charge - which took us back to Tannenboden, where our hotel was. Probably the most physically demanding walk of the day then ensued - pushing all our luggage back up the hill to the cable car station! This done, rather pink faced and out of breath, we took the cable car back down to Unterterzen, and from there a rather crowded train back to Zurich.