I am back! I think a year has passed since I last posted anything. I have been heckin’ busy, so much has happened in a year. I am still in Switzerland, having just passed my PhD First Year exam. Yay! And now I have three posts that I am writing up from this summer. Sit back and enjoy them as they slowly slowly come out over the coming weeks! I may do a life-update as well. Maybe.
(Currently working on adding a map to this which actually has contour lines etc.. Suggestions welcome. Trying to do this currently in OpenStreetMap, but unsure if this will work)
Day 1 | 12/07/24 | 17km | 1950m elevation
Hello dear friends. It’s time for another hike. For another excursion into the wilderness.
My good, old friend Twig came and visited me here in Switzerland. It was the end of a long, draining spring for me, and the beginning of a drowsy summer. The spring had been frantic. I had been teaching and rushing all around Europe for conferences and experiments and now finally, peace at last. My colleagues at work were all departing one-by-one, and returning one-by-one from their various holidays. Or talking about upcoming trips. Me? I only had this planned for the summer so far. And maybe I will go home for my birthday.
The weather in Suisse had not been promising so far this spring. Or even this year. The snow had stayed longer than most people could remember allegedly, staying all the way down to 1800m well into June, meaning that the passes in the mountains over 2000m were inaccessible to summer hikers like me – the biggest crime I swear. I say ‘summer hikers’ by the way because that is exactly what I am. I am not brave enough to venture out in the snow and ice and darkness of winter as of yet. I feel I need to take a course and gain some experience somehow first.
Anyways, I am getting sidetracked., Yes, finally I had a friend from home come and visit me, and we had settled on doing the Tour des Dents-du-Midi. It wasn’t meant to be too strenuous (oops), and it was fairly close by, just over an hour on all the public transport to get there. Two trains is all. And a bus. Only that to get to our starting point!
I fled work on the Friday nice and early, leaving work on the dot at 12:00. Genuinely! I watched the time tick to 12:00, stood up from my desk and left. I headed home, a neat twenty minute walk away. There were dark clouds over the mountains across Lac Leman, but above me there was blue sky.
I arrived home to find Twig waiting for me. She had arrived the evening before and had spent the Friday morning running in the Lavaux. A casual 21km run through the vineyards before she had come back to my place, had a swim in the lake, and then packed. I had not accomplished nearly that much today!
My pack was basically ready, having loaded the majority of it the previous night. New pack by the way, a ‘well done, you got a job’ present to myself. Big Red, the Osprey pack I did the TA with holds a special place in my heart and will be reserved for weekend hikes where nothing is serious. But this weekend, I felt I needed speeeeed. Therefore I had my new AtomPack. I still haven’t settled on a name for it yet. I am thinking something along the lines of ‘Pathfinder’ or ‘Wayfarer’ or ‘Small Red’… (Name suggestions welcome!)
Anyway, I had packed… ‘Small Red’… the previous night and now all I needed to do was fill up my water bottles and head out the door! We caught the 31 bus from St Sulpice all the way to Renens station where we stopped at the small supermarket to pick up some lunch and some snacks. Lunch? Croissants. Also, never realised, but Coop (one of the two major supermarkets here) do some absolutely funky trail mixes! I got one with rhubarb mixed in with nuts, and another one with only mango and cashews. I promise you it works, although I will say as a caveat, mangos and cashews are both incredibly different textures! Groovy.
The train pulled up quietly as they all do in Suisse, and we hopped on. It pulled out again and made it’s way along the shores of Lac Leman, the ancient vineyards of the Lavaux rising high above us to the left, and the shimmering lake skimming away under our window to our right. The Alps stood like a barrier across the horizon, their jagged tops still crowned in snow and wreathed in grey, bitter clouds. We changed trains at Vevey, hopping onto the Inter-Regio. Everything ran like clockwork. How Swiss.
The train eventually arrived into St Maurice, and we hopped off, eager to begin. It was 14:30 and we were so ready. St Maurice was nestled just down the Valais. Towering behemoths rose around us, and Twig gaped in awe. She was used to the mountains in Scotland which, whilst mysterious, ancient and beautiful, stood small in stature compared to the Swiss Alps. I believe it is actually very hard for your brain to process just how large the Alps are. I can’t even start imagining anything to do with bigger mountain ranges such as the Himalayas, the Hindu Kush, the Altai or the Rockies. Actually, segue again – sorry – I have been making a consecrated study of the mountains of the world, and some of the names just evoke wonder, I swear. The Hindu Kush in Pakistan just sound so holy, so aloof, so uncivilised. They stopped Alexander the Great from conquering the world after all. Or the Brooks Range in Alaska where only a handful of people have made a successful crossing on foot and rivers roar out of it and into the biting Arctic Ocean. Or the Carpathians where wolves and bears still run wild in Europe and castles lie crumbling and ruined. Or the Zagros Range in Iran, abandoned at the end of the alphabet. Or the Atlas mountains in Morocco, holding the sky above our heads. I could go on, but they really capture the imagination. Mountains truly embody the human spirit and I think this is what attracts us to them over and over again. To climb them until we cannot, and push on anyway.
Spiel and philosophising aside, I shall continue this small monologue. Yes, Twig was amazed at the beauty and majesty of the Swiss Alps, and so we set off, to climb up them. From St Maurice, we headed out of town, up a road and towards the steep slopes of the Dents-du-Midi.
The path soon turned from a concrete marching slab to dirt trails which criss-crossed back and forth as it made its way up the side of the mountain. We followed along, winding our way between trees with shaking leaves, a roaring gorge falling off the right of us and only the occasional chain to hold on to stop us from slipping and falling. The humidity of the air was awful, and we were sweaty and sticky before long. I still prefer this state to sitting at my desk though I will not lie. Hands down. I solved the problem of humidity by stripping off a layer and leaving myself with a cool breeze tickling the back of my neck. It’s the small things. No one seemed to come along this path though, I kept walking into spider webs and it just seemed… lonely.
We continued through the pine forest until we finally emerged out at the bottom of a small grass meadow, a Swiss farm above us, its wide windows looking down towards us. We looped around this empty, overgrown field and emerged onto a small forestry road. Our route for today alone would take us along this road, and then up towards Lac Salanfe.
The walk along the road was super chill. This is what happens when you can finally walk along a contour line. Same gravitational potential, no work done. That’s the physicists logic though, I can ensure you work was definitely done. The road continued along all the way to a small village called Mex. I like to think this is pronounced ‘Meh’ which I am not sure is correct, and maybe slightly insulting because it was definitely the opposite of being ‘meh’. A beautiful town, we wondered through it’s Alpine silence. Small, cobbled streets under our feet and the houses snuggled closely to us as we approached the village centre where there was a running fountain to refill our water bottles, gurgling away, and delicate pink flowers grew from vines on the church.
Grey clouds were overhead now, and the forecast was starting to look a little grim. Therefore, we decided not to spend too much time in ‘Meh’ but continued on and out of the town, taking a small grass-beaten path through some overarching trees towards Lac Salanfe. The path led down a little bit (which is disheartening, because you know you are going to have to make up that elevation again) before it exited out of this small mountain woodland and dumped us on top of dam, a river crashing away to our right, tumbling down the side of ‘the Dents’. We posed for photos as we made our way across the river on a single plank of wood. Yeah, this is a well-worn track evidently!…
Clouds were now swirling among those jagged teeth, hiding the mountainous crown, and were descending towards us. To draw upon Greek mythology again, I will say that the interaction of clouds with mountains has to be one of my favourite natural phenomenon. It is like Ouranos was dancing a love story to Gaia for us mere mortals to witness. The clouds made patterns shaped by the mountains, and they tumbled down like slow motion waterfalls, small vortices appearing and dispersing.
It enveloped us seventy percent of the way up the other side, after crossing the river. We now had a difficult decision to make. We could embrace the cold and wet, or we could put waterproofs on and sweat inside them which is straight up grody. It’s like your entire body is suffocating! I personally decided on putting on my waterproof jacket, but left my waterproof trousers tucked into the front mesh of ‘Small Red’ (please, help me out with name suggestions for my new pack!). I also discovered on this climb up that Twig had never seen Lord of the Rings. I only sighed a small sigh. This realisation was made when she said that she was about to be as high as she had ever been and I replied with “One more step Mr Frodo”! She didn’t get the reference. We were approaching 2100m at Col du Jorat, the pass into the Lac Salanfe basin.
As the large Jesus-cross marking the pass emerged from the heavy fog, Ouranos evidently started crying for the rain started in earnest, before it shortly turned into hail. Poor Twig stubbornly remained in her shorts! That must have been sore! My own trousers were completely soaked through, it would have been pointless to put my waterproof ones on now. So I continued on the way. We bolted down the other side of the pass, catching glimpses of Lac Salanfe as we made our way to the large refuge situated at the side of the lake.
Ten minutes after crossing the pass, and ten minutes of hail and heavy rain, we arrived sopping into the entrance way of the refuge. OK, confession time. I find these Swiss refuges so weird. Like, they are fully functioning hotels in the middle of the mountains. They have hot showers, electricity, staff with uniforms and little clipbooks and pens, a fully run kitchen and helicopter resupplies, little brochures and polished floors. I feel they have missed the point of escaping to the mountains. People now simply retreat to the mountains, but don’t fully escape their comfort zone. This is a little island of civility in the midst of the wilderness. It shouldn’t be here. It seems so alien. But that is just my opinion, they do serve certain people for sure.
We sat in the entrance way, dripping wet and waited for the worst of the rain to pass. We interacted with the warden of the hut, but we insisted that we didn’t want to stay but instead we were planning on staying just out of sight, slightly further up the path. It is forbidden to camp within sight of one of these Alpine huts/retreats/hotels by the way. Unless expressly granted permission to.
The rain eased up a little bit, and the light was starting to die, and so we shouldered our packs again and headed on out again, into the grey drizzle. Ten minutes later, we were turning off the path, away from Lac Salanfe, and towards a little hidden flat area. Time to pitch up for the night.
This little flat area was somewhere I had spied out in an earlier visit to this place, but it was now so heavily flooded that we settled for pitching up just beside the path. Easy enough. It was a record pitch I swear, maybe three – four minutes for my dear Rogen. My one-man Akto is an easy ninety second tent to pitch, in contrast. We bundled our gear under the vestibules and got ourselves into the tent. ‘Collapsed into the tent’ may be a better way of describing it. A ten minute doze, and we roused each other. Food! Food. OK. I got the cooker out and started boiling some water. My dinner tonight? Everyone altogether now: ‘Cous cous’! Always has to be the cous, gotsta love the cous. I think I bedded down that evening as the rain pattered against the tent outer, happy exhausted and content. This is what I love doing. I slept like a baby.
Day 2 | 13/07/24 | 42km | 1600m elevation
We woke early since we had a big day to do. And also I was a little anxious about having someone hike past and tell us off. That was the main reason, I won’t lie. That’s just who I am I guess! I unzipped the tent door, little cold drops of condensation falling over my wrist, and I peered outside to see wispy clouds shrouding the mountains in the rose dawn. The morning light was pale and the air was fresh. Good omens for a day of hiking. We set about packing up and making breakfast. Coffee for Twig. Seems a lot of people need it to survive! The stove had a weird moment though when it was heating up some water, the control got stuck and the gas was left on, streaming out. It got fixed before long without too much alarming panic…
We finished packing up. The sun was now up and we set off up the path towards Col de Susanfe. The ground was sopping underfoot from all the rain yesterday and last night still streaming off the mountains around us. It was nice and sunny though, and before long, the uphill climb turned into a sweaty affair. We stripped off our jumpers and jackets and pushed on. There are two routes up to Col de Susanfe, the ‘summer’ and the ‘winter’ route. Well, it was summer, so we took the summer route. It was so good as well, when we stopped and looked around us, the mountains were still wrapped in muslin clouds, teasingly letting us see glimpses of their granite flanks. The lake was also behind and below us, sparkling in the morning light.
The summer route continued up, but soon it started being a little sketchy, with loose rock and landslips crossing the path. There were also points where the path was blocked by BIG blocks of ice and snow, leftover from the winter and not having melted yet. Twig was glad of her microspikes. I just slowly followed behind. Not so encouraging. Additionally, we saw people from the hut all heading up the winter route. It seems that there might have been a warning at the hut not to go up the summer path which we missed since, you know, we were camping! Ah well. A couple of awkward obstacles later though that we took at quarter tempo, and we were approaching the top. There was snow still at the col. It was at 2500m after all.
We arrived at the top at the same time as pretty much everyone else. There was no one, and then there was everyone. A convention of some sort, it kinda felt like. They had come from the hut behind us at Salanfe and ahead of us from Susanfe. However, they all turned and headed on up towards the top of the mountain, still wrapped in thin scraps of cloud. They had backpacks overhanging and dripping with ropes, cams and belays and big B2 boots. All very serious. All very heavy duty. We sat out of the way and had a breather and a little bit of well-deserved food.
We pointed ourselves down the other side, into the Susanfe valley, and tumbled down towards the cabin situated there. It was going to be a nice mid-morning rest stop for sure. We arrived, having passed regular hikers pulling themselves past us, uphill, and sat outside the cabin in glorious sunshine. Now, once again, the ‘cabin’ is more like a hotel in Switzerland. Seriously! We ordered some coffee and hot chocolate and cake and sat with our feet up eating it. It was simply delicious! The server guy was funny, he went about hopping after us as we headed inside to order, having been outside on a smoke break or something. It was just the way he moved so quickly that I found funny more than anything else, like a lobby boy in the Grand Budapest or something.
We finished our little break there with brushing our teeth (minty), and then headed on our way once more. We headed down and down. The valley runs east to west and so the sun was at our back, our long shadows stretching out ahead of us. It turns a corner, northward, and into a gorge. We made our way along the edge of the gorge, a muddy reservoir below us, held back by a small dam. A ‘barrage’ in French. A river tumbled out of the reservoir and went roaring down the gorge. We crossed the dam and then made our way down the rock walls of the gorge, down steep rock sections where there were plenty of chains and ropes that we could hold on to. I personally felt like I was Indiana Jones. Proper adventuring, you know? Twig, on the other hand, wished she had an extra inch of height just to help her down some of the steep rock faces! She said later that she would have preferred going up this section but personally, that was a big no from me! It was waaay too steep for that sort of thing! I also got phone signal here once more, so I checked the All Blacks rugby game and saw that my man Beauden Barrett was having an absolute stormer of a game. Nice!
We reached the bottom of this steep gorge section and emerged out onto proper hiking paths once again, running under sheer cliff faces. As we made our way down this, we met plenty of trail runners heading up the other way. Now let me stop and have a wee bit of a tangent here. The fitness of Swiss people should not be allowed. There are people running up these hillsides at full pace, knotted steelcables for muscles. It’s honestly just a little bit demoralising at points. There I am, tottling along all content and happy that I can hike up these massive mountains, to then see people running up at full tilt, barely breaking a sweat. Some people are just insane, I swear! Like, come on! It’s impressive and makes me want to be able to do that one day, but knowing myself, I feel that it would take too much commitment right now.
Eventually we reached a fork in the path. We could continue down towards Champéry, or continue on the Tour des Dents-du-Midi… TDM let’s call it. We continued along our route, of course. From here on out, it basically just contoured around the Dents-du-Midi. The path passed over a beautiful long bridge over the river, gushing out of the gorge we just came down, and then continued into a forest and on to a long, steep uphill pull. Honestly, these long uphill climbs were just painful at points. I could feel my legs complaining any time I craned my neck to look up a long hill. I mean though, this is what I get for hiking around a mountain. In the Alps. What else could I expect!?
We passed several couples who were also hiking the TDM, so we can’t have been going that slowly. It really was beautiful though. There was a deep valley off to our left where Champéry was sitting pretty. Alpine huts with their sloping roofs and hanging flowers pots and wooden facades were covering the entire valley, small winding roads leading up to individual houses and neighbourhoods. The mountains were still wrapped up in their thin kimonos of clouds. Twig was actually a little annoyed that she had not yet had a clear look at “her dents”, said with a proper British pronunciation. The mountainside was covered in forest and alpine meadows with cows and sheep mutely grazing. What a life.
We eventually arrive at Cabane d’Anthème. We perched ourselves above the cabin with it’s glorious view, and set about lunch. I spread the tent out in the midday sun so that it could dry as Twig headed down and bought some lemonades for us to drink as we basked in the pale sunlight and ate our food. I think I lay down at one point and was totally ready to snooze a little. However, instead, I eventually heaved myself up and set about packing my bag again, collecting all the dried items and packing them into ‘Small Red’.
The TDM then led us along a path where there was a sheer drop to our left with just chains and cables to hold on to on our right. Like, we had just emerged from a wonderful pine forest and suddenly we were confronted with this kinda crazy path. Good thing it was sunny and not at all any adverse weather. Pushing on, we passed a guy trying to take off with a big paraglider before we finally started the downhill descent towards civilisation once more. We were hoping to pass this final refuge and then find somewhere to camp for the night. The downhill was rough, my knees did not enjoy it, but we promised ourselves that we would buy some ice cream at the refuge as a nice incentive.
This is another thing with Switzerland and the refuges, right. Because we slowly and painfully made our way down the hillside until we unexpectedly reached the refuge. A beautiful large mountain hut with dormitories and showers and a café aannddd… a road. With parked cars on it. Like, we do all this work and spend all this sweat and energy getting to these refuges to find people sparkling clean having driven there. It’s kinda infuriating in the moment, but with a little perspective, the funniest thing to think about. But also, just imagine the accessibility of these mountains, that people of all skill and ability can access these beautiful mountain huts. It is something to be admired for sure. Here at the refuge, I got myself a fudge ice cream (which I regretted, it was so sweet) whilst Twig had a mango sorbet. I also introduced her to the Swiss national fizzy drink, Rivella. The secret ingredient Rivella is kinda wack, I won’t lie. They use cheese curd as the base ingredient for their national fizzy drink. Like, what!? Wild.
Time to start looking for a place to kip down for the night. We put our packs back on and then headed on around the mountain. To be fair, we only had less than 10km until we had completed the trail. However, we wanted one more night in the mountains. Understandable, right? The issue was going to be to find somewhere to sleep. The Swiss laws are that we cannot sleep below the treeline, and not within sight of a building. Roughly. We kept our eyes peeled and we saw nowhere. Nowhere. Nothing. De nada. Rien. Which… shouldn’t have been particularly surprising, we were on the side of a mountain after all. OK, to be fair, there were several spots that would have been perfect, except they were occupied by cows, or were someone’s garden. Or were fenced off. So yeah, nah, nothing.
Well, good thing we were less than 10km away from the end. That meant about 2hrs of hiking was left, and so we continued our descent back to St Maurice. It was all in the forest at this point and we rarely emerged into an open field or meadow anymore. It was also horrendously muddy at points. Like, Longwoods muddy. Pole sinking all the way in, sorta thing. We bombed down the path and after about an hour, with our knees and joints complaining, we found a road which would take us the rest of the way. Which sounds ideal, doesn’t it? Well, it just meant more impact on our already-sore joints so actually, it kinda wasn’t. Ah well, sufferfest at the end of the day it seems.
The road led us to a charming town Vérossaz where we passed Alpine houses with their wood and paint and shutters and perfection with families eating outside in the setting sun, talking amongst themselves, high up in the fresh air of the Alps. What a dream. Such a wonderful dream. Could you imagine? From this small town, perched above St Maurice, we then headed down some vicious switchbacks down a cliff face that brought us out onto the road that we had started on, just under 36hrs previously. We followed it all the way back to the train station where we finally sat down with a sigh of relief. The train arrived before long, the penultimate one of the day, and we arrived back at my place at 23:30. Sleep soon followed.
The TDM was amazing, and doing it with Twig was real good, we absolutely beasted it for sure. I am not sure I know many other people (other than TA folk) who could have crushed that distance and elevation, so big kudos to Twig. The hike itself is beautiful, especially the middle part through Salanfe and Susanfe. I think the hike around the back of the mountain where we are above Champery is decent and beautiful and calm, but it isn’t the staggering majesty of the Alps. More like the Julie Andrews wonder and gentleness of the Alps. If that makes sense. For now, I will continue with the Haute route project and prepare for the Tour du Ruan with Rob and Reid in September which will be an absolute beast as well. And then yes, we will see if anything else happens this year!…