Adventures in the Night
There’s something wild and utterly unfamiliar about hiking at night. It tickles your spine and raises all your senses to the edge. As your eyes fight to adjust to the dark, your sense of hearing is heightened to pick up every fluttering leaf and scutter on the forest floor.
I was pushed into nighttime adventures by the pattern of the sun in the northern hemisphere. Due to the seasonal changes in the daytime, the night stretches longer the further away from the equator you go. In Switzerland, it means the sun dives behind the lake before I clock off work. Hence, my usual evening walking routine gets disrupted.
After a few weeks of being housebound by the dark and cold raging outside my cozy apartment, I decided to take back the night.
I layered on thick, armed myself with a headlamp, and headed to the hills.
The darkness rendered my usual trail entirely alien. The forest trails I wandered effortlessly during the day time now required much more attention. I found myself tripping over tree roots that tangled on the path and getting snagged on low hanging branches. Each step needed to be considered.
The headlamp reinforced my attention to my immediate surroundings. It gave a whole new meaning to ‘tunnel vision’ - where I could only see objects central to my field of view.
Walking in this shallow depth of field led to a newfound appreciation of the forest. Turning my head would spotlight certain areas into sharp focus. I saw new details leafing out into the shadows - and strange silhouettes of gnarled branches stark in my fluorescent light. I’ve used my powerful beam to look deep into the trees, where I’ve seen eyes staring back at me.
My first few endeavors in the dark gripped my chest in fear. I stuck to the open roads where the city lights were a welcome sight of civilization. As I became accustomed to evening walks, I braved the forest trails that hug the edges of the wood, looping in and out of the canopies.
Late-night walk to the Schwarzenbach Wasserfall
One particular night my partner joined me, and we ventured deep into the trees to find a waterfall shrouded in black. It was one of my favourite evening wanderings. The wanderweg (the Swiss national hiking trail) wound steadily down the hill, where little rivulets sprang across our path.
After twenty breathless minutes, we reached our destination. The sound of the waterfall crashing into the plunge pool below increased threefold with our new-found senses, building to a rumble of deafening thunder.
We paused at the edge of the water to warm our bellies with hot chocolate I brought along in a thermos. My phone read -2°C. It’s funny, now that our ears were bombarded with sound, our eyes grew keener and picked up new details in this tableaux. Aside from the rush of the water, the rest of the dene lay ominously still, like frozen statues.
We stayed as long as we dared, but turned back when the cold bit at our fingers and toes. I led the way with my lamp, and we slowly ascended back up the path before returning to the warmth of our apartment.
