Chamonix To Zermatt

The Haute Route

August 19th & 20th 1994

Grimentz to Zinal and on to St Luc

The forecast wasn’t brilliant, but looked good enough to see us through the next three days at least. Was five good days more than we could hope for? Grimentz was rapidly being transformed into a finishing point for the grand bike race. It looked like a process that was familiar to them as the pistes were converted into bike runs and a large grandstand was erected at the top end of the village and barriers were erected everywhere. The village was also filling up with cyclists and their support crews, media people were arriving and it was obviously going to be a very busy weekend, with what was looking like quite a prestigious event. We were leaving just in time. 

Lac de Moiry 

We loaded our packs and slung them onto our shoulders and headed out to make progress once more. We walked back up to the barrage, only this time, instead of heading along the lake, we headed up the mountain to cross the Col De Sorebois and over to the village of Zinal. The day felt very different from yesterday, with icy winds and grey skies, not the clear, sunny day of twenty four hours ago. We couldn’t resist a stop at the cafe by the barrage for a very welcome cup of hot chocolate. It warmed us through and gave us an energy boost ready to tackle the steep ascent ahead. On and on the path continued zig zagging back and forth, but always upwards. Without ever being busy, there was a surprising number of people on this stretch of path and also surprisingly, many of them looked very ill equipped for the mountains. Eventually we reached the col at 9,543 feet, from here it was all down hill to Zinal. Or it would have been had we chosen to take that route. We may have been tired from the climb up, but the summit of Corne De Sorbois looked temptingly close at hand and was after all only another 110 feet up from the col. So we kept going, onwards and upwards, we couldn’t miss out on a summit when it was so close by. The extra little climb was worth it, the views took our breath away, literally! It was so windy we could hardly stand up!

We could see for miles into the high peaks all around us and far down into the deep valleys on either side of Sorebois. The villages of Grimentz one side, Zinal on the other and St Luc straight ahead, they looked so far down below us that it felt like the view from an aeroplane. We could see the Lac De Moiry shining bright and blue, far below us and the subtle concave curve of the dam at its northern end.  Time to move on, conditions were not conducive to hanging about and admiring the view for too long. I must just mention one other unusual sight. There was one other person up there at the summit, a man, who seemed to think he was an aeroplane. He was running around in great looping runs, holding the bottom corners of his jacket, with his arms in the air, rather like a child does when they are pretending to fly. Given the conditions I’m surprised he didn’t take off, I kept expecting the gale force wind to whisk him off into the unknown.

returning to the col we took the path down towards Zinal and once off the ridge, the sun came out and it began to warm up. There was a cable car from just below the ridge that could have taken us straight down to Zinal, but it was never a consideration. We had all the time in the world and we were enjoying the walk down in the afternoon sunshine, so we passed by the cable car station with hardly a mention. “ oh look a cable car”, “oh yes, I wonder who uses them?”. 

The path down from Col de Sorebois to Zinal 

The descent down into Zinal seemed never ending, winding this way and that through endless forests, but there were views of a new range of mountains to familiarise ourselves with. Besso, Zinal Rothorn and the Weisshorn (14,645 feet) as well as the Zinal Glacier, towering over the upper Zinal Valley. The other Besso I was looking for by now was the Hotel Besso and by the time we spotted it in the late afternoon, it too was a wonderful sight.

It was easy to see how the hotel got it’s name, the window in our room opened up onto a valley with Besso, the mountain, dominating the view. The room was aesthetically perfect, absolutely delightful. It was very tastefully decorated and everything matched and fit together perfectly. Not quite as roomy as the Hotel Moiry, but this one just edges it for the award of most perfect room of the trip.

Dinner however was a different matter. The restaurant was very, very stylish, to the point of making me feel a little uncomfortable as I sat there in my walking gear, trying not to look too conspicuous. We didn’t have room in our packs for the clothes we would normally wear for this kind of dining, nor would we have wanted to carry them. After a long day’s walking the main requirement is food, lots of it and quickly. We were doing nine hour walks, sometimes more and tough walks at that, there was a lot of replenishment needed at the end of the day. Lots of carbs were best of all, large plates of pasta was what I was craving by the evening. Of course the quality of the food is important too, but most of all it needs to be free flowing and filling. Although the food at Hotel Besso really was excellent, it was a bit too nouvelle cuisine to be satisfying and worse still, there was half an hour between courses, which for me meant that the hunger I felt, never actually went away. Not that the service was poor, it was simply meant to be an experience to savour at leisure. Our needs were not matched by the occasion and perhaps we were not in the right condition to make the most of it. After dinner we went for a stroll around the village and topped up our diet with biscuits and crisps from a vending machine that was conveniently placed across the road from the hotel.

 

 
                                                                            Zinal
 

We had been promised by the guide book, that the walk from Zinal to the Weisshorn Hotelwould be something special, probably the best day of the walk and it certainly lived up to it’s promise. The weather seemed to be on an improving cycle, maybe, just maybe, we could get enough good days out of it to see us through to Zermatt, we were hopeful, even optimistic. By now we were confident that we were fit enough and strong enough to do this and only the weather could prevent us from successfully completing the walk.

Aug 20th 1994 

As usual the walk started with a steep, very steep climb up through the afforested lower slopes of the mountain. We tried to identify the birds that were living in the pine trees in quite large numbers, but our sightings were few and very fleeting as they darted between the trees and disappeared into the dense foliage. We could hear them almost all of the time, their calls varied from a soft mewing sound to a raucous Jay like call. They were a similar size and shape to a Jay, but much darker. They were  similar to a woodpecker, but not bright enough in colour. It was only some time later when we saw a poster of ‘Birds of The Alps’ that we were able to identify it as a Nutcracker, a dark bluish member of the woodpecker family. They live on a diet of pine cones and we had seen lots of discarded, chewed pine cones on the floor of the forests, but had put it down to the black squirrels, that were also our regular companions through the forest sections of our walks. 

 

Meeting friends along the way

 

Our daily walks really were very challenging and had to be planned as strictly as possible, but each day also had it’s lighter and spontaneous moments. Moments of unexpected pleasure and delight, not just from the spectacular views, but often in less expected and less obvious ways. Moments that nature would spring upon us, like the spotting of a new flower, the sighting of a soaring raptor, a comical squirrel or stoat. So many ways in which nature kept us interested and entertained. Our walks were a daily communion with nature, we were spending more time out in the open countryside, the wild, wide open countryside, than either of us had done for many years, if ever before.

 

The Zinal Valley

 

Each time we reached a break in the trees we stopped to look back at the mountains and each time the clouds seemed to have lifted higher. It even looked as though they were just about to clear the mountains completely. We stopped and watched, but each time as the clouds lifted, more clouds followed behind, slowing down as they reached the mountains, giving us tantalising glimpses, but never fully clearing. The sky was a deep blue across most of the sky, the only clouds left now were just clinging around the highest peaks and they too would soon be burned away by the hot sunshine that was increasing in intensity as the morning wore on.

The path eventually eased to a gentle incline, clear of the trees, sometimes contouring along the wild alpine meadows. Zinal was now far below us with glaciers sweeping down to the valley from Le Besso, Dent D’herens and many other major snow covered peaks that tower way above the top end of the valley. Then as the last of the clouds disappeared, revealed in all it’s glory, we had our first full view of The Matterhorn, one of the most exciting moments of our long walk. It was a special moment, to actually see our destination for the first time and believe that the end really was in sight. In truth it was still a good three and a half days of walking before we would arrive in Zermatt, but at least now we could see the end and realise that the start was well and truly behind us, just a distant memory. The progress was real and tangible, however, it did feel a little strange that The Matterhorn was behind us and we were walking away from it, but that’s just the nature of the walk, we had to get to the point where we could cross from one valley to the next over the high mountain pass. The view was magnificent. With every twist and turn of the path, every change of direction or elevation, the view changed and every time we stopped to take yet more photographs. It was so beautiful up there that we converted what should have been a three hour walk into a five hour photo session. 

The Matterhorn and Weisshorn at the head of the Zinal valley 

We came across an old run down farmstead with what just about passed for a field alongside it. The building was run down and had suffered the ravages of the weather at seven thousand feet. There was no one living there, but there was a group of four beautiful horses, two fully grown and two young foals, grazing together in the sunshine with the most spectacular of backdrops that any horse could ever wish for.

The valley began to widen and we had to negotiate a series of embankments that had been built up as avalanche protection for the residents far below. It’s quite awe inspiring to see the extent of the work that is needed to slow down the sliding snows that obviously threaten the area during the winter and early spring. The structures were like huge dams waiting to be filled with water, only in this case they were waiting to catch the snow and harness the power of gravity. The terrain changed to a more loose kind of limestone underfoot, a more jagged horizon and a rougher landscape altogether. Then at last, the Hotel Weisshorn came into view. This should have been our resting place for the night, but the hotel was fully booked with visitors up here for the weekend, so after refreshment and a brief look around it’s faded nineteenth century splendour, we headed off down the valley to the village of St Luc. It was much further than we had expected and some two hours later we were wandering through the village looking for the Hotel Beau Site. That’s the trouble with booking ahead, you never quite know how convenient the hotel is likely to be, but it does relieve the anxiety of having to find somewhere at the end of a long day of walking.

The Hotel Weisshorn with St Luc in the valley far below. 

Most of the hotels that we used along the way seemed to have an obvious reason for their names and on arrival  at Hotel Beau Site we could clearly see the reason behind this one. It faced up the valley towards the highest summits and the eye was constantly drawn to that magical mountain, The Matterhorn. I don't think I spoke much during dinner that night, I just watched The Matterhorn turning pink under the setting sun.