I tromped happily up old snow to the ridge, and was soon in the pass. Up there I discovered, as one often does, that the landscape on the other side of the pass was very different from what I had seen so far. I was looking north along the western side of a long steep ridge, called the Muttenbergen, which ran to a peak called the Muttenstock, then dipped and continued up again to a peak called the Ruchi. The west side of the Muttenbergen dropped very steeply into a lake called the Limmerensee-1200 vertical meters in less than a kilometer horizontally. The steepness was not continuous, happily, but rather a matter of two cliffs, high and low, separated by a band about the steepness of a church roof, still covered with snow. This snowy stretch was called the Kistenband, and my way forward ran over it. The pitch looked a bit uncomfortable, but given the cliffs above and below, there was no other way forward. Unfortunately the trail lay under the snow.

Well, a line of bootprints in the snow showed me where the trail no doubt ran. I took off and followed them. The Kistenband: it was a good name. I was no longer surprised that a feature like this had a name;. I had learned that the association of the Swiss with their Alps had gone on so long that were names for practically everything you could name, right down to individual boulders. Цtzi the Alpine Man could have named this band five thousand years ago.

The line of bootprints in the snow ran a little closer to the lower edge of the Kistenband than I would have liked, but the untrodden snow above it was much slippier, so there was no good alternative to following the tracks. The bootprints were only semi-frozen at this point in the day, both slick underfoot and with a tendency to collapse down and to the left. Where the Kistenband ended the cliff fell away so steeply that I could see not see anything of the lake below, but only knew it was there because of my map, which showed it was a long narrow reservoir, a thousand meters lower.