The Zug Feeling

Words Christian Seiler Date 10 May 2024

An excerpt by author Christian Seiler on exploring the mountains around Lech am Arlberg from Rote Wand magazine.

I love these mountains. I love the wind gaps carved into the rock faces, the vertical patterns that the snow and water draw into the stone. I love the bold ideas that inevitably come to mind when you walk through the high valley and wonder what it might be like up there, where the sun reveals all the colors.

Today I decide to take the loop through the Spullerwald forest, cross the river Lech, which carries little water, and walk past a few clunky cars that have been left here by others, I think, walkers. I am alone, in the shadow of the towering rocks, slowly finding my rhythm: step, breath, step, breath, in the “melody of walking”, as the French anthropologist David le Breton calls it, and while I am just visualizing the harmony of the moment, the balance between curiosity, effort, and peace that sets in when I have found the right pace in the right place, a metallic voice buzzes at me from the top left: “There’s shooting here!”

A small church dedicated to St. Sebastian

The Zug valley in spring

“I am alone, in the shadow of the towering rocks, slowly finding my rhythm: step, breath, step, breath, in the “melody of walking”, as the French anthropologist David le Breton calls it.”

Startled, I stop, locate the warning hunter in a well-camouflaged high stand, where, paradoxically, he is crouched in a brightly colored safety vest, pointing his shotgun upwards, where the chamois/deer/snow hare must fear for their lives. “That’s a hiking trail,” I say, a little stuffy. But the high-visibility vest just slaps the stock of his shotgun with the flat of his hand.

The melody of walking, now dissonant. I can no longer find a rhythm because I strike a gait like a human who in no way wants to be mistaken for a deer or a wild boar, hopping, whistling, ambling. Again and again, I see hunters in their warning vests standing in the trenches that descend from the Stierlochkopf or the Unterer Schafberg, and then I hear the short bang of the rifle, which multiplies on the slopes of the Arlberg massif and confirms the warning from the entrance.

I continue along the Lech River until I turn around at the deserted forest camp. The cars with the defined muscles are now parked in front of the Alpele, the hut on the Lechtalweg. The chamois lies on a loading area, a hole in its torso, a pine twig in its mouth. The animal is dead. The hunters are in the inn. The way back to Zug is clear. I walk in peace.

Arlberg has many hiking trails

Lake Spuller in Lech am Arlberg

Another time, the rain surprises me. I had planned to walk from Lake Formarin to Lake Spuller when, a few hundred meters before the summit of this wonderful hike, I noticed black clouds forming, still far away. My natural impulse would have been to sit down and watch the storm as it crept in, capturing the colors of the late summer day and making the mountain landscape glow dramatically before the spectacle begins: wind, rain, plummeting temperatures, lightning, thunder—a sensual spectacle that the most sophisticated Hollywood specialists must fail to imitate.

Fortunately, I still have a few instincts that tell me to get back to the safety of a dry place as quickly as possible, and so I cross the Steinernes Meer with long, quick strides to be caught in the pouring rain just before Alpe Formarin, the likes of which no spa architect will ever achieve. The qualities of this moment become apparent later, when I arrive at Rote Wand, drop my wet clothes, dry off, warm up, and talk and am asked questions and can report what all my senses have perceived: the beauty that is also inherent in the drama. The elemental that has so much lightness here. The experience that puts the dimensions in which we are used to living into perspective.

Zug is a hinge between nature and culture, between imagination and reality, a sluice through which you can pass to feel the world better, to sense its wonders, and to claim your own place in this world of wonder and be surprised, and sometimes overwhelmed, by it.

Zug is a place of serenity, perhaps even a place of contemplation, if you allow your surroundings to tune you to this tone. And it is a place of longing as soon as you take the road down into the forest and leave the village behind you, for an hour, for a day, for a year.