Frontier Fascination

This is the tale of an extraordinary adventure, completing the circuit of the Swiss border on foot, by bike and kayak, following the line of the frontier as closely as possible. A total distance of close to 2'500 km, and 120'000 vertical metres (about 13 times the height of Everest!) covered in 115 days in 2015 and 2016, in sometimes dangerous conditions off the beaten track. In this time the author scaled just over a hundred summits and an equivalent number of passes or cols on the border, including mythical peaks like the Monte Rosa and the Matterhorn; he hiked in the Jura, Ticino and the Grisons, and kayaked on Lake Geneva and the Rhine. It was also a feat, at the age of 75! The book includes sections on smuggling and examples of glacier shrinkage as well as some 30 "frontier stories" that represent an invaluable source of information on the history and geography of the Swiss frontier.