I can’t believe I’ve lived in Switzerland for so long and this was my first visit to Stoos. I was absolutely blown away by the scenery, it’s definitely going to be a place where I take visitors in future.
First of all, to get to the village of Stoos, we took the steepest funicular in the world. What an amazing feat of engineering! From a distance, it looks like the train track is almost vertical but it isn’t. At it’s steepest though, it is a whopping 110 degrees. As the train climbs, the carriages rotates so that you don’t feel like you’re on a roller-coaster, it’s actually incredibly smooth.
From Stoos we walked to the Fronalpstock chair lift. At the top we enjoyed amazing views of the Vierwaldstättersee and the mountains surrounding it. After that, we walked half the ridge trail towards Klingenstock and then back again. Ideally, we would have walked the entire ridge trail but the chair lift at the other end was closed. The ridge trail is awesome but with 1000 steps in total and hardly any flat sections it is certainly hard work on the knees! It wasn’t as scary as I had envisaged but I’m glad that we did it in perfect weather conditions. I don’t think it would be as enjoyable if the steps were slippery!
Can’t wait to go back and have a go at doing the whole trail!
Language tip
Did you spot the conditional? We use third conditionals to re-imagine the past, to say what we would have done if the circumstances had been different. For example:
"If the Klingenstock chair lift had been open, we would have walked the whole ridge trail." (If + had + past participle, would have + past participle)
Instead, I use what I call half a conditional:
"we would have walked the entire ridge trail but the chair lift at the other end was closed".
I used 'would have + past participle' to show the hypothetical result and combined this with a 'but + past simple' instead of 'if + past perfect'. Both sentences express the same idea, perhaps the version I used is easier to form. What do you think?
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