The Saint Gotthard Pass and Saint Bernhards

Shortly after our drive through the regions of many waterfalls we arrived at a high mountain pass known in English as the Saint Gotthard Pass (in Italian it’s the Passo del San Gottardo). This pass connects the Italian speaking part of Switzerland with the German speaking part (including Lucerne). There is an 17 kilometre tunnel that goes under this pass, and is the way most of traffic gets through the pass these days. As we got closer to the tunnel entrance we could see a huge traffic jam (they only let a certain amount of vehicles go through the tunnel at a time). There is also a road that goes over the pass, but it is only open 4 months of the year. We happened to be here within that time frame and our guide elected to go over the pass, hoping the rain would not turn to snow.

Up we went with the big bus, I was watching the temperature drop outside (the bus had an outside temperature display). It got as low as 8 degrees, but fortunately no lower. We stopped at the summit for a brief break, and we were able to get some pictures. By that point the rain had stopped, and other than being a little cold, it was awesome being up there. The Swiss Alps are spectacular mountains, every bit as breath-taking as the Canadian Rockies. For me the most interesting thing about these mountains is how much they are covered with green, and not coniferous trees either, rather grasses and shrubbery that goes way up the sides of these mountains.

The road over the pass was fairly narrow, filled with curves, and at one point the road literally was hanging in space as the Swiss engineers had built a curve jutting out from the actual mountain. The roads through the Rockies can be pretty nerve-wracking to drive, this mountain pass road was worse than any road I can remember in the Rockies. But Massimo is a great driver, and no one felt too uncomfortable or worried as we made our way around this crazy road.
Going through the pass we drove by a monastery and a connected hospice, and at that point Elzo our guide told us that for many centuries the various mountains passes in this region had hospices for travellers run by local monks. The monks running a hospice in one of these passes, the Saint Bernard Pass, bred a dog (originally from Mongolia) to assist them in caring for the travellers - this of course in the Saint Bernhard. These dogs were bred large enough to move about in deep snow, and with a keen sense of smell to find lost travellers.

We didn’t get lost, and we made it up the mountain and down again without incident. It was a thrilling drive, and I kept marvelling at the people who used this pass in centuries gone by, without the advantage to modern road construction to make things a bit more passable. Once safely at the bottom of the pass we met up with the main highway again, and continued on our way to Lucerne (Luzern in German).