On Sunday, three Decatur men will relive an adventure in the Swiss Alps.

During a 10-day trip last summer, Bruce Nims, Mark Sorensen and Bill VanAlstine hiked over mountain passes, meadows, forests, boulder fields and glaciers from Chamonix, France, below Mount Blanc, the highest peak in Europe, to Zermatt, Switzerland, the access point for the Matterhorn.

They were in a party of 10 - eight men and two women - from Champaign, Vancouver, Indianapolis and Walnut Grove, Calif.

Sorensen was the oldest, 59. The youngest was about 45. Most had mountain-hiking experience. Each had to carry a 25-pound backpack loaded with 10 days' worth of clothes, medicine, the daily lunch, snacks and two or three liters of drinks.

A slide show and comments about this unusual trek will be given at 2 p.m. Sunday in Madden Auditorium of the Decatur Public Library. The free show is co-sponsored by the library and the Macon County Conservation District.

Nims organized the trip through Distant Journeys, a travel company. It arranged hotels, most meals, hiking directions, maps and rail passes.

"There was a significant challenge every day," Nims said. "Walking on a narrow path on the side of a mountain is dangerous. If you miss a step, you'll roll for a while."

The altitude was no problem, however. "The highest we went was 9,000 feet," Nims said. "It's bothersome when you get to 12,000 feet."

The walking started at 8:30 a.m. and continued till about 5 p.m. "We often walked up 3,000 feet and down 3,000 feet in the same day," Sorensen said. "The daily mileage varied between five and 12 miles, and we estimated that everyone walked about 100 miles on grass, dirt, boulders, snow and through streams.

"Most of us used hiking poles to assist in taking pressure off the knees and to add stability in certain areas."

Before the hike started, the group spent four nights in a Chamonix hotel to get accustomed to the time zone and altitude and took several practice hikes across from Mount Blanc.

"I call it a comfortable adventure," Nims said. "We slept in beds each night. Some of the people cooked."

The group did not use ice axes or ropes and did no technical climbing.

The sleeping cabins were two or three hours walk from any public transportation. Some type of bedding was provided.

Each day's instructions from Distant Journeys included how to take alternative transportation if you could not hike on a given day.

"Four of us decided to take day nine off from going up and down a mountain," Sorensen said. The alternative easy trip around the mountain required five modes of transportation and about four miles of walking.

"This was one of Bruce's dreams," Sorensen said. The hike combined a search for athleticism, the physical part, with an exotic setting.

"Bruce is a risk-taker," Sorensen said. "I'm a conservative person. You had to overcome fear. The 10 of us were on our own but we watched out for each other."

Sorensen, former assistant director of the Illinois State Archives, previously accompanied Nims on trips to Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa and the Grand Canyon.

"I trained for this with weight-lifting and aerobics and walking up the hill to the Fairview Park swimming pool as many as 20 times a day."

Nims said the Kilimanjaro trip was the longest, and "so hard we didn't finish."

VanAlstine, a veterinarian, had hiked with Nims groups in the Grand Canyon and in England. Nims also has visited the lost Inca city of Machu Picchu and the Amazon rain forest and paddled a kayak in the Sea of Cortez. He is entrepreneur-in-residence at Millikin University.

"I did a lot of walking with a pack to prepare for this one," VanAlstine said. "It's certainly a do-able hike if you take time to get in shape."

The next adventure will be a cycling trip in France, Nims said, "but not the Tour de France."

Before then, they're planning something less strenuous. "The three of us and spouses are going on a Mediterranean cruise," Nims said.

Bob Fallstrom can be reached at bfallstrom@herald-review.com or 421-7981.