In retrospect, walking from one end of Switzerland to the other in the middle of the hottest summer on record was not an altogether smart move. Of course, plans had been made long before, with the heights of the Alps chosen specifically to escape the summer heat (in a year which had already proven to be remarkably warm and dry). Little did I imagine at the time, however, that temperatures in Paris (and London) would hit 100 degrees or more, and the thermometers in the Alps would register only slightly lower. So off I went, out of the frying pan and into the fire.
But first, some statistics. The Alpine Pass Route crosses Switzerland from Sargans, at the eastern border with Lichtenstein, to Montreux on the west, along the shores of Lake Geneva. The walk is about 325 kilometers (202 miles) long and crosses sixteen mountain passes, all of which require a total climb (and a more or less equal descent) of 18,000 meters (59,000 feet). Or so I am told by one of the two slender guides to the route (Kev Reynolds’ Alpine Pass Route and Lonely Planet’s Walking in Switzerland). And a guidebook of some sort is pretty much required, since the route is not an official one marked with special “Pass Route” blazes. Rather, it simply weaves its way through the maze of well-marked paths that lead to virtually every peak, pass and valley in Switzerland.
Guides vary as to how many days they think the Pass Route requires. Although described in 15 (or so) stages of a day’s walk each, suggestions range from 15 to 30 days (depending on the number of rest days, whether or not some of the longer stages are split in half, and time out for bad weather). I took an optimistic approach – which, given the hot weather, was a bit too optimistic -- and preplanned 16 days walking and two rest days, with lodging scheduled in advance and a suitcase of supplies shuttled for me from inn to inn. (Logistics were arranged by Discovery Travel, an outfit I recommend highly.) I walked carrying just a knapsack, which always seemed far heavier than it needed to be. Much of the route was through towns so small that they fail to appear in the standard Swiss travel guides (no kidding). Only the central section of the walk – through Mieringen, Grindelwald, and Lauterbrunnen – will sound at all familiar to most people.
Solving the puzzle
As with England’s Coast to Coast Walk, part of the enjoyment of the Pass Route is simply solving the puzzle of finding the correct trails through beautiful but unfamiliar territory. With a guide in one hand, one of the excellent Swiss topographic maps in the other, and a trail marker in sight, it is hard to get truly lost. In the few instances when I did lose my way, it was usually due to missed or missing trail markers, and since much of the route is above tree line, relocating the trail (or at least a trail) is usually not that difficult. But other challenges add to the mix: Reynolds’ book was written nearly 15 years ago, and many things, large (the location of a trail, for example) and small (such as dirt roads that are now paved), have changed since then. Sometimes Reynolds and Lonely Planet take different routes to the same destination. And at times, I picked out a route of my own choosing. All part of the puzzle.
Whichever route details you follow, the general idea is to walk from one small town to the next, staying overnight at an inn and supping at a local restaurant. Since, when traveling east to west, towns tend to be in valleys separated by mountain ridges, there’s at least one pass to cross each day. Hence a daily routine of the long grind uphill in the morning, followed by the slow (to protect my sore knees and feet) downhill slog in the afternoon. And as the days got hotter, the uphill grind became more and more sweaty, and the downhill, by mid-afternoon, felt like a descent into Dante’s Inferno. Until the weather broke near the end of the walk, there was hardly a cloud in the sky, and the sun at these elevations is intense (thank goodness for SPF 60 sunscreen). Even very light breezes were a rarity, so sweat puddled rather than evaporated and often I felt as though I was cooking in my own juice.
So just how hot did it get on the walk? I actually do not know for certain. Since I didn’t have a thermometer, I regularly asked the locals. And everyone I asked, no matter how hot it was, always replied 34 degrees (which is 93 degrees in Fahrenheit). I have no idea why; perhaps Swiss mountain dwellers cannot imagine a temperature any higher. But many was the time I felt sure they were wrong (and I did see newspaper reports of over 100 degrees in other parts of Switzerland). In one town in particular, late into the night, it felt as though I were standing in front of an open oven. My daily wash was bone dry within an hour, even my wool socks, which usually took a day or more to dry out.
Every known mechanical conveyance
It took very little time for me to realize that the heat was going to have a serious effect on my walk – and that it (the heat) was only getting worse. Daily stages ranged in length from 13 to 31 kilometers, with height-gains anywhere from 500 to 1800 meters or more per day. Hence I sometimes resorted to mechanical aids when the opportunity presented itself. By the time the walk was over, I had been on almost every type of mountain conveyance known to humankind: train, cog railway, funicular, cable car, ski lift, Swiss Postbus, even a generously offered ride in a private car.
Although the list appears to be a lengthy one, the actual amount of elevation-gain or distance shaved off the total was not, I think, especially great. By three or four o’clock on an especially hot day, I might take a funicular rather than roast for two more hours in the sun. On a very long day, a cog railway at six o’clock in the evening saved me from ruining already desperately weary feet. Once, a truly monumental uphill climb in the morning was shortened a bit by a breezy ski lift. And on my only truly rainy day near the end of the walk, after I was both thoroughly soaked and (briefly) scared out of my wits by a ferocious lightening storm, I escaped to the valley floor by cable car rather than face an unknown number of additional hours in pouring rain.
For me, a moderate amount of alpine transport both spiced up the route and helped reduce the wear and tear on my feet and knees. My not-so-young-anymore knees fared reasonably well, but the considerable amount of serious downhill walking ended up giving me several blisters (my first in many years) on my toes. Several times, as I tried to figure out how to both keep going and heal my feet, mountain transport helped prevent a bad situation from getting worse.
The only sour note in all this was one small mountain railway crowded with tourists. On this oppressively hot early evening descent, half of the single car was filled with an international assortment of kids. Unaccountably, as soon as the train left the almost toy-like station, all hell broke loose. It was juvenile pandemonium the likes of which I have never seen, and not a single adult in the car seemed to feel any responsibility for halting the ear-splitting chaos. The twenty-minute trip certainly put my days of mountain solitude in a new perspective.
All work and no play…
Well, it was not all hard climbing, sore feet, and sweaty shirts. There was, of course, the mountain scenery. Classic Swiss valleys, jagged rocky peaks, hanging glaciers that appeared to defy gravity. At times it seemed the valleys fell away to a bottomless nothing, the peaks stood as thin and shear as a giant granite sail, the glaciers across the narrow valleys were close enough to touch. Some meadows and mountainsides were still rich with wildflowers. Here and there were patches of wild strawberries or blueberries (or a close relative), nice additions to my simple trail food.
Almost everywhere there was the sound of water from creeks large and small. And then there were the cowbells. Every cow, goat, or sheep has its bell, and every mountain valley its herds. The ringing of bells was so ubiquitous that you often felt as though you were inside a giant wind chime. Since the livestock frequently found it as convenient to walk the trails as I did, the downside was that you often had to watch carefully where you put your feet (and often spent no small amount of energy swatting away the flies). That particular aspect of the trip I called Elsie’s Revenge.
Several of the more easily accessible passes host model airplane clubs, whose members fly remote controlled gliders. With wingspans of about a six-feet and painted a rainbow of colors, these model planes soared overhead with a subtle but attention-getting whistle. In the steep valleys the paragliders took over, quietly catching the breeze and adding distant flashes of color to the landscape. Amazingly, as I walked over Kleine Scheidegg, I watched paragliders so high up the famous north face of the Eiger that they were in danger of being engulfed by a cloud. I have no idea how they got up that high.
It was Swiss National Day when I arrived in Sargans. Walkers with flaming torches lined the path up the mountain behind town, and outlined its silhouette with flickering lights as darkness fell. I had a ring-side seat for the fireworks, and watched as a late-to-the-party torchbearer, realizing that the flame made it hard to see the fireworks, nearly set the town on fire trying to put his torch out. In Grindelwald some 1500 mountain bikers filled the town the evening I was there, and raced off on the Sixth Eiger Bike Challenge as I started out the next morning.
I watched a hot air balloon drift silently through mountain valleys below Kiental (it was Balloon Week in nearby Kandersteg). Below the Klausenpass, I stopped at a tiny chapel perched high on a valley wall to rest briefly in the shade. To my surprise (due, I suppose, to my New-World-centric view of Catholicism), I discovered ex votos dating back to the 1800s tacked to the porch ceiling, and silver body-part charms in glass cases on the altar.
I sometimes lunched at improbably remote, trail-side restaurants. Dishes containing mushrooms were always interesting (the Swiss take mushrooms, and the search for them, very seriously), and one meal in particular containing an abundance of fresh-picked chanterelles was a delight. And I finally was able to fulfill a wish of mine to return to Murren, high on the rim of the Lauterbrunnen Valley. I took a rest day there, enjoying panoramic views of the Eiger, Monch, and Jungfrau from my balcony. In the early morning I watched as the sun rose in the gap between the Eiger and the Monch, shooting rays of light like a giant floodlight, and at night I saw Mars, bright flickering orange, appear over the coal-black silhouette of the Jungfrau.
At the end of the trail, I stepped from the pier at Montreux onto a paddlewheeler almost a century old. On a nearly windless day when Lake Geneva, the mountains, and the sky were all shades of blue, the boat made a lazy, rather anti-climactic six-hour traverse of the lake to drop me at Geneva. There, on yet another distressingly hot afternoon, I could see sparkling white Mont Blanc far in the distance. Amazingly, barely more than three hours later by high-speed train, I was back in Paris, where the heat of the summer had finally broken and, for the first time in weeks, I was finally able to enjoy a cool and breezy evening.