I've been wearing hiking boots pretty much since I arrived here and its about time to exercise them on some hilly bits. First stop is the range overlooking the hotel, where there's a selection of glacial valleys with the town nestled in the bowl of the valley.
Some of the slopes had much loose scree, a function of the soft rocks being eroded by the ice and snow which is a feature of the area for much of the year. The ice gets into the crevices in the rocks and then breaks small pieces creating the loose stones covering much of the hillsides.
The rocks became mountain ranges as a consequence of plate tectonics warping what would have been a sea bed and pusing it many metres intoi the air. Thats why there's small sea creature fossils in some of the rocks.
The particular summits were in the 2000-3000 metre range, which is high enough to be able to experience different weather systems from those closer to sea level.
I'm trying to add some photos whilst still operating the circa 10 minute per post rule but the combination of slow bandwidth and no Edge, GPRS or G3 on my cellphone is making it difficult, hence some of the pix being drastically compressed jpegs as an interim measure.
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