Laowai

As I was crawling up this mountain, following Bea, I thought about how when your kids are little you ask them to do difficult things and now my kid has grown big and she's asking me to do something difficult. 

Bea really wanted to do a Via Ferrata which is a climbing route with steel fixtures and cables that you clip into using climbing gear. It gives the feeling of being a rock climber but there are already fixed foot holds and ladders attached to the rock. There's our approximate 500 meter route above. It took us about 2 hours.

We started the day watching some helicopter forestry. We watched this helicopter over and over – picking up a tree on one side of the valley and placing it gently on the other side of the valley. So Swiss!

Here we are just at the beginning of the Via Ferrata. I was nervous but once I got started it wasn't really that hard. You hardly have to put a foot anywhere but on a pre-made foothold so that makes it easier. And of course your harness is always clipped onto a safety cable. I did avoid looking around and down at a couple particularly scary spots.

Almost to the top.

I'm so glad I did this with Bea. It was a challenge but the views were amazing and Bea was so happy. She was in her element. 

We had a longish walk down the other side of the mountain.

Meanwhile Brian and Claire were doing a somewhat less scary hike.