I set out alone to climb Mount Pilatus, but quickly became disoriented in the maze of country lanes and gated cow paths that serves as a trail.  Eventually I met a Romanian girl named Ilka, also hiking alone and lost, and together we managed to ask directions from an elderly local woman who spoke no English.  We hiked together for an hour.   At this barn we paused for a photograph together, with her camera.  I shot the scene also but without us in it.   She turned back soon after, by way of a cable-car to the mountain’s base, while I continued through the fog to the summit.   I never saw her again.

Klimsenhorn-Kapelle
I was deep in a cold spring fog, six thousand feet above nothing on my way to the summit of Mount Pilatus, when this tiny chapel appeared out of nowhere.  It was perched on a rocky saddle high above timberline, shuttered and padlocked and surrounded by a wire fence.  Below its walls the ground fell away sharply for a thousand feet.

It was built around 1850.  I don’t know why or by whom.