Three Lakes hike near Airolo.

With no major plans today, I decided to do another hike close to Airolo.  To get to the hike, I first had to take a funicular which had an incline of up to 88% at one point!  Pretty amazing.

Once at the upper station, I followed a road for about 30 minutes to a huge dam, behind which was the first lake: Lago Ritom.  The view from the dam was quite a shock: there was hardly any water in the lake!  Very sad.  Global warming is hitting hard everywhere..

From there, I walked along the lake shore for a while, until a steep trail took me to the second lake: Lago Tom.  This lake fortunately still had plenty of water in it!  Walking along the shore, I noticed a bunch of butterflies feasting on something.  Quite amazing to see this!  From the backside of the lake, the trail basically disappeared, and I had to climb up a steep hill until I reached the main trail that took me all te way downhill to Lago Cadagno.

I decided not to walk all around this lake, and started the 1.5 hour return hike to the funicular instead.  When I reached the far end of Lago Ritom, I decided to walk along the other side of the lake.  The first part involved a very steep dropoff ending at two magnificent waterfalls!  From there I followed the up and down trail all the way back to the dam.  The view of the partially empty lake is quite depressing! 

Back at the dam, it took another 20 minutes to reach the upper station of the funicular.  Unfortunately, it had just left, and I had to wait about 45 minutes for the next one.  The ride down took about 10 minutes.  

Back at the car I was quite tired from this hike of about 8.5 miles, but glad I did it!