Читать книгу Trekking in the Silvretta and Rätikon Alps. Tour of the Silvretta, the Prattigauer Hohenweg and the Ratikon Hohenweg plus 12 day routes онлайн

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Perhaps seen more than any other bird in the Alps, the ubiquitous alpine chough scavenges for picnic leftovers on accessible summits and around mountain huts. This member of the crow family has an unmistakable yellow beak and coral-red feet, and is often seen in small, boisterous flocks among the high rocky places.

Alpine flowers

Clockwise from top left: Trumpet gentian; Gentian lutea; Glacier crowfoot; Daphne cneorum (all photos: Linda Reynolds)

But it is the sheer volume and variety of alpine flowers that in the early summer transform the Silvretta and Rätikon Alps with a bewitching palette of colour. Wandering along the track that leads to the Chamanna Tuoi (Tuoi Hut) on one occasion, we were struck by open meadows in the lower Val Tuoi in which there were so many flowers in bloom that we could imagine there was no space left for a single blade of grass to intrude. Elsewhere the screes and boulder fields below the southern face of the Drusenfluh and Sulzfluh were transformed into magnificent rock gardens, whose visual beauty was matched by the fragrance of scores of tiny daphne flowers (Daphne cneorum).