Alpen-Panoramen, Panorama der Alpen

The morning after the previous panorama, I was cycling in direction Brunnen when I saw, in front of me, an interesting mountain full of wide meadows. I grabbed the map, and I realized that I was approaching the fabled Rigi! So, at Gersau I looked for a road going up the mountain; I found it, and it led me to the place shown here.
As one easily sees, the atmosphere accompanying my climb was amazingly different from that which had accompanied, 129 years before, the legendary climb by the legendary Tartarin de Tarascone:

On the 10th of August, 1880, at that fabled hour of the setting sun so vaunted by the guide books Joanne and Baedeker, an hermetic yellow fog, complicated with a flurry of snow in white spirals, enveloped the summit of the Rigi ( Regina montium ) and its gigantic hotel, extraordinary to behold on the arid waste of those heights, that Rigi Kulm, glassed in like a conservatory, massive as a citadel, where alight for a night and a day a flock of tourists, worshippers of the sun.
While awaiting the second dinner gong, the transient inmates of the vast and gorgeous caravansary, half frozen in their chambers above, or gasping on the divans of the reading rooms in the damp heat of lighted furnaces, were gazing, in default of the promised splendours, at the whirling white atoms and the lighting of the great lamps on the portico, the double glasses of which were creaking in the wind.
To climb so high, to come from all four corners of the earth to see that... Oh, Baedeker!..
Suddenly, something emerged from the fog and advanced toward the hotel with a rattling of metal, an exaggeration of motions, caused by strange accessories.
At a distance of twenty feet through the fog the torpid tourists, their noses against the panes, the misses with curious little heads trimmed like those of boys, took this apparition for a cow, and then for a tinker bearing his utensils.
Ten feet nearer the apparition changed again, showing a crossbow on the shoulder, and the visored cap of an archer of the middle ages, with the visor lowered, an object even more unlikely to meet with on these heights than a strayed cow or an ambulating tinker.
On the portico the archer was no longer anything but a fat, squat, broad backed man, who stopped to get breath and to shake the snow from his leggings, made like his cap of yellow cloth, and from his knitted comforter, which allowed scarcely more of his face to be seen than a few tufts of grizzling beard and a pair of enormous green spectacles made as convex as the glass of a stereoscope. An alpenstock, knapsack, coil of rope worn in saltire, crampons and iron hooks hanging to the belt of an English blouse with broad pleats, completed the accoutrement of this perfect Alpinist.

The extreme-gradient track that on sees in the center of the image (but recall that photos nearly always fail to genuinely render gradients) leads directly to the Rigi-Scheidegg. Unfortunately, I was due to be in Zürich for the afternoon, and I had no time to undertake the long traverse to the Rigi-Kulm: hence, mine remained only a partial repetition of the mythical Tartarin achievement.

5 horizontal shots, Canon G9, 7.4 mm (= 34), 1/250 sec, f/8, ISO 100.
Larger: www.panoramio.com/photo/92936163