Bergnotizen

Last hut night of the season

Most mountain huts close in the first weeks of October, and the last weekend always has a particular mood. The hut keepers are tired and cheerful at once, the store room is half empty, and dinner is whatever is left: in our case barley soup, then rösti with an egg and a generous amount of cheese that "had to be finished". Nobody complained.

We walked up from the valley in a little under four hours, the last part on a path already dusted with fresh snow. The larches below the hut had turned a deep gold, almost orange in the late light, and the north faces across the valley were white down to about 2500 metres. It was cold enough that the water trough outside had a thin skin of ice by six o'clock.

Only eleven guests that night, in a hut that sleeps sixty. We had a dormitory to ourselves and still everyone ended up in the same corner of the dining room, close to the stove, playing cards and comparing tea. The hut keeper told us that she had counted almost four thousand overnight stays this summer, a record, and that the helicopter would come on Tuesday to take down the rubbish and the empty gas bottles.

In the morning the valley was full of fog and the peaks stood above it in perfect sunshine. We waited an hour for the sea of cloud to sink before walking down into it, which felt a little like going back to work.

Two days on a glacier trail

The trail along the edge of the great glacier is one of the classic walks of the southern Alps, and also one of the saddest. Signposts along the way mark where the ice reached in 1850, 1900, 1950 and 2000, and the distance between the last two markers and today's ice is shocking. Where my father walked on the glacier as a young man, there is now a valley of grey rubble and a milky lake that did not exist twenty years ago.

We walked from the cable car station down to the old moraine and along it for most of the first day, then spent the night in a hut built on a rock spur with the ice on three sides. At night you could hear the glacier: deep cracks and groans, the rattle of stones falling into crevasses, the constant sound of running water underneath.

The second morning was perfectly clear. The ice looked endless and white in the low sun, and for an hour it was possible to forget the signposts. Then we walked back past them, slowly, reading each one again.

If you go: the path is well made but long, with a lot of loose stone on the moraine sections. Good boots and poles help. The hut needs booking well in advance in August, and the cable car down stops earlier than you expect.

Autumn colours in the larch forest

For about two weeks in October the larch forests of the high valleys turn gold, and the whole landscape looks lit from the inside. The larch is the only conifer in the Alps that loses its needles in winter, and before it does it puts on the most spectacular show of the mountain year.

The best walks for the colours stay at the level of the forest, between about 1800 and 2200 metres, where the trees are old and widely spaced and the light comes through sideways in the afternoon. We followed a path along the edge of the valley from one village to the next, with the lakes below us reflecting the gold and the first snow on the peaks above.

The needles were already falling in places, and the path was covered in a soft orange carpet that muffled every step. A nutcracker followed us from tree to tree, shouting harshly and hiding pine seeds in the moss for the winter. It will find most of them again, the experts say, and the ones it forgets will grow into the next generation of trees. I find that a very reassuring arrangement.

By the end of October the colour is gone and the forests stand bare and quiet until spring. If you can only visit the mountains once a year, this is the fortnight I would choose.

Reading a weather forecast for the mountains

After many years of getting wet, I have settled on a simple routine for reading the forecast before a hike. None of it is secret, but it took me a long time to actually do it every time.

First, look at the freezing level, not just the temperature in the valley. A pleasant 18 degrees in town can mean frost and verglas on the path at 2400 metres. Second, check the wind at summit height. Anything above 50 km/h makes ridges unpleasant and exposed passages dangerous. Third, look at the timing of thunderstorms. In summer the typical pattern is a clear morning, cumulus building from late morning and storms from mid-afternoon. The answer is almost always to start earlier, not to hope.

Finally, compare two sources. When they disagree, the weather itself is usually uncertain, and that is useful information in its own right. On such days I choose a route with an easy way down.

Jura ridge in one long day

The Jura is the quieter neighbour of the Alps: lower, rounder, covered in beech forest and wide pastures with dry-stone walls. On a clear day the ridge offers one of the best views in the country, the whole chain of the Alps lined up across the plateau from Säntis to Mont Blanc. We walked a long section of the crest path from one pass to the next, about twenty-six kilometres with surprisingly little climbing once we were up.

The path is marked with the yellow signs and red-white stripes, but the real guides are the cows. Where the cows have walked, the ground is firm. Where they have not, there is usually a reason. We passed three mountain farms that sell cheese and syrup from a cool box at the door with an honesty jar beside it. The cheese from the second one, aged in a cellar under the barn, was the best thing I ate all summer.

In the afternoon a herd of horses blocked the path for twenty minutes, standing in a circle and swishing flies off one another. There was no going around. We sat on a wall and waited, which turned out to be the most restful part of the day.

Practical note: water is scarce on the ridge in late summer. Most of the fountains marked on older maps are dry. Carry at least two litres and refill at the farms.

A ridge walk above the lakes

Some hikes are about the summit; this one is about the view on both sides at once. The ridge runs for about eight kilometres between two cable car stations, never very steep, with a lake on the left and another on the right for almost the entire way. On a clear September day you can count the steamers crossing below, small white shapes with long wakes behind them.

We started early to avoid the crowds that come up with the first cable car, and for the first hour we had the path almost to ourselves, apart from a herd of goats with bells that followed us for a while out of curiosity and then lost interest. The grass on the ridge was already turning brown, and the gentians were the last flowers left, deep blue in the short turf.

Halfway along there is a small chapel with a bench and a guest book. People write in every language: thanks for good weather, prayers for sick relatives, a child's drawing of a cow, a marriage proposal (accepted, according to the next entry, written in a different hand on the same day). We added a line about the goats.

The descent from the second station is long and hard on the knees. We took the cable car down instead and spent the saved hour on the lakeshore with our feet in the water, which I recommend without reservation.

Learning the names of peaks

For years I could name perhaps five mountains from any given viewpoint, and I guessed the rest with great confidence and frequent error. This summer I finally made an effort, using the panorama boards at viewpoints, an old paper panorama drawn by hand in the 1930s, and a lot of patience from friends who grew up in the valleys.

The trick, I found, is to learn a few anchor peaks with very distinctive shapes first. Once you can find those from anywhere, the others fall into place around them like stars around a constellation. The pyramid that is visible from half the country. The flat table mountain. The pair of sharp twins. The long white wall with three summits that looks different from every side but always has the same snowfield in the middle.

It changes the experience of a viewpoint completely. Instead of a beautiful but anonymous row of white teeth, the horizon becomes a list of places, some of them walked, some of them dreamed about, some of them just names with stories attached. I have started marking the ones I have stood on in the old panorama with a small pencil tick. There are not many ticks yet. That is the good part.

Rain day in the hut

The forecast promised showers; what arrived was a full day of steady rain and low cloud, the kind that does not move at all. We were in a small stone hut at about 2000 metres with no reason to go anywhere, so we stayed, and it turned out to be one of the best days of the summer.

The hut keeper lit the stove at ten, made polenta in a huge copper pot that needed stirring for an hour, and let us take turns. A group of Italian students taught us a card game with rules that seemed to change every round. An older couple from Basel had brought a book of mountain poems and read a few aloud in the afternoon, in German and then, for the students, in slow and careful Italian.

Around five the clouds lifted for twenty minutes. Everybody went outside in socks to look at the waterfalls that had appeared all over the opposite slope, dozens of white threads that had not been there in the morning. Then the cloud came back down and we went back to the polenta.

Not every mountain day needs a summit. Some need only a stove, a good pot and enough rain to keep everyone inside.

Old paths and new signs

Many of the paths we walk today are much older than hiking. They were built to move cattle to summer pastures, to carry hay down in winter, to reach the next village for market or for church. You can often still see this in their construction: carefully laid stone steps on steep sections, walls on the downhill side to stop animals from slipping, small shelters at regular intervals where people waited out storms.

The yellow signs that guide hikers today were added much later, and they are very good. But I like to look for the older signs underneath: a cross carved into a rock at a junction, a stone with a date chiselled into it, a tiny chapel at the point where the path leaves the last meadow. They tell you who used the path before and why.

On one old mule track I found a stone marked with initials and the year 1794. The path is now part of a popular long-distance route, and hundreds of people pass that stone every summer without noticing it. I did not notice it either, the first three times.

Small things on the way up

On long climbs I play a game of noticing one small thing every hundred metres of height. It keeps the mind busy when the legs are complaining, and it slows me down in a good way. On last Saturday's climb from the valley floor to the pass, about 1400 metres, the list looked something like this.

A lizard on a warm wall, so still that I thought it was a stone. Wild thyme between the rocks, which smelled when I stepped on it. A water channel, one of the old irrigation bisses, running along the slope with barely any fall at all, built centuries ago to bring glacier water to the meadows. Alpenrose in full flower. A marmot whistling at us from a boulder and then, unwisely, coming closer to look. Edelweiss, just two plants, in a place I will not describe. A patch of old snow with red algae, the so-called watermelon snow. A cairn somebody had built with great care, eight stones high, balanced perfectly. Then the pass itself, with the wind and the view into the next valley, and a couple from Lyon sharing apricots with anyone who sat near them.

The game works on descents too, although by then the list mostly consists of knees.

Packing list that actually gets used

I used to carry far too much. Over the years the list has shrunk to the things I have actually needed at least once on a day hike in the Alps. Everything else stays at home.

• Rain jacket and a warm layer, even in July. Weather above 2000 metres does not care about the calendar.
• Cap, sunglasses, sunscreen. The sun at altitude burns through clouds.
• Two litres of water and something salty.
• Paper map of the area, in addition to the phone. Batteries die in the cold.
• Small first-aid kit with blister plasters, which are the only thing I ever use from it.
• Head torch, because the "short" descent always takes longer.
• Gloves from September onwards.

Things I have stopped carrying: a second pair of shoes, a large knife, binoculars (I never took them out), and a camera separate from the phone. The pack is now about five kilograms with water, and the days feel noticeably longer and easier.

The village with one bus

At the end of one valley there is a village that is served by exactly one bus a day in each direction outside the summer season. It leaves the village at 7:12 and returns from the railway station at 17:40. If you miss it, you walk, or you knock on doors, which in this village is apparently a perfectly normal thing to do.

We arrived on the evening bus with our packs and spent two nights in the only guesthouse, run by a family that has kept it for four generations. The dining room has photographs on the walls going back to the 1890s: mule trains, early climbers in tweed jackets, a wedding party standing in deep snow, and the arrival of the first car, which is apparently still remembered as a minor disaster because it could not turn around in the square.

The walks from the village are wonderful and almost empty in May: larch forest, waterfalls full of meltwater, high pastures still brown before the cows arrive. We met one other hiker in two days, an elderly man who was walking to visit his sister in the next valley, as he has done every spring for fifty years.

On the last morning we caught the 7:12. The driver knew every passenger by name except us, and by the time we reached the station he knew ours too.

Snowshoes in March

Late winter is my favourite time for snowshoeing. The days are longer, the snow has settled, and the sun has real warmth by noon. We did a gentle round from a small ski village, up through the forest to an alp and back down along the frozen river, about five hours including a long lunch.

The forest was full of tracks: hare, fox, roe deer, and at one point the neat paired prints of a pine marten crossing the path and disappearing up a spruce. Above the treeline the snow had a hard crust in the shade and turned soft and heavy in the sun, so we chose our line by following the shadows, which is a good habit anyway for avalanche safety in spring.

A reminder that matters: even on marked snowshoe trails, check the avalanche bulletin the evening before and again in the morning. Spring conditions change during the day, and slopes that are safe at nine can be dangerous by two. We were off the open slopes before midday and ate our sandwiches on the terrace of the closed alp hut, in the sun, with our boots drying on the railing.

First walk of the year

The first walk of the year is always a test of how much fitness the winter has taken away. This year I chose an easy loop in the Jura foothills, through beech forest and across a frozen plateau to a viewpoint above the lake. About fourteen kilometres, almost no difficulty, and a good restaurant at the halfway point that serves soup and bread to people with muddy boots without any fuss.

The forest was silent apart from woodpeckers. In February they begin drumming to mark territories, and the sound carries a long way through the bare trees. Patches of snow remained in the hollows, full of tracks, and the streams were loud with meltwater. On the plateau the ground was frozen hard in the shade and soft as porridge in the sun, often within a few metres.

From the viewpoint the Alps stood along the whole horizon above a layer of fog over the lake, sharp and white and very far away. Summer felt far away too. But the legs worked, the soup was hot, and the year had properly begun.

Why I keep a notebook

Every hike I have done since 2009 has a few lines in a small paper notebook: date, route, time, weather, who came along and one or two things worth remembering. It started as a practical record so that I would know how long a route took. It has become something else.

Reading back through the notebooks I can see how my pace changed, which routes I return to and which I never repeated, which friends came along in which years. I can see the summer it rained every weekend and the autumn when the larches were the brightest anyone could remember. I can see a line written in shaky handwriting on a summit in a strong wind: "Cold. Worth it."

This site is a small public extension of that notebook. Most notes stay on paper. A few end up here, mainly the ones that might help somebody else plan a day out, or that simply made me happy to write down.