Hope and Peace and Pain – Part 4

This is the fourth of five installments of an article that first appeared in Trail & Timberline magazine. Read the first installment here. Read the second installment here. Read the third installment here.

The Walker’s Haute Route takes trekkers through the alps from Chamonix, France, to Zermatt, Switzerland.

See a gallery of photos from the route here.

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Day 10 | Zinal to Gruben
Rain.

We catch The Irish Ladies and learn they’ve managed to get a place to stay in Gruben, the next destination on our route. We had tried days earlier to reserve beds and were told there was no room. We stand there in the rain, in the woods, and bashfully place a mobile phone call. I can’t say I enjoy this jarring use of technology, but, lucky us, we now have a place to stay.

And the rain continues.

Brianna gets so excited about the rain, she decides to play slip-and-slide in a mud bank. I kid, of course. Her screeches alert me to her cartoonish troubles. Like a sprinting cat on linoleum, her strides amount to wasted energy and nothing more. Finally, after I’ve screamed instructions through the now-horizontal rain, she makes her way up under the tree I’ve found for cover. I compliment her mud-covered butt and admire the filth that drips from her pack.

We pass the time by playing a word game, reciting back and forth a series of words whose first letter is A, then B, and so on, taking turns while adding a word each time. Artichoke. Balthasar. Cacophony. Deuteronomy…

As the slope rises to the pass, we spot the first signs of snow and near a pair of German-speaking mountain bikers, half-naked in the mist. They’re changing into dry clothes after having crested the pass, heading in the opposite direction from us. They are large men and they’ve just carried their bikes down from the snow-covered scree fields in the clouds. They smile, or maybe smirk, then ask us if we have schneeshuhe as they point in the direction of the fog-shrouded pass. They raise fingers stretched 6 inches apart.

“Nein, nicht schneeshuhe,” I say, fumbling with the German word for snowshoes. Of course, I’m thinking, “We’re from Colorado. We live at the same elevation as this high mountain pass of yours.”

We figure they are more local than the two of us and, thus, take pride in having a little fun with the foreign couple.

We scramble up through the snow, which turns out to be nothing more than a thin, rimy coating. Nothing treacherous really, unless maybe if you happened to be carrying a mountain bike.

As we pass over the Forcletta, we witness slightly clearing skies; but there are still no views. We emerge from the confines of the basin and enter another series of lonely shepherd villages, and on to Gruben and the German-speaking portion of the Swiss region of Valais.

The tiny hamlet of Gruben is dominated by an intimidatingly large hotel, Hotel Schwarzhorn. We’re greeted by a wonderful cat that bounds to us, rolls for us, gets his fill of us, and runs from us as cats do. This fleeting moment of feline exuberance fills us with sheer joy, knowing that the innocence and enthusiasm of cats is shared the world over. Now we are exuberant.

After plodding around bashfully with wet clothes and dirty boots, we find our room, a fine example of the simple yet finely crafted and handsome woodwork of our many Swiss accommodations.

Brianna attracts more awkward moments: She knocks on the shared bathroom door and a naked man exits into the hallway to tell her he will be a minute; he then returns to the bathroom. She finds another shared bathroom in the lobby and quickly realizes that she is interrupting two people sharing a moment in the shower.

I wonder if, with the change in language, we will note a change in menu, or decor, or personality. I don’t have to wait long, as our first dinner in German-speaking Switzerland was pork and a big beer. Big.

As our schedules seem to be diverging from that of The Irish Ladies, we bid them good luck and farewell.

Day 11 | Gruben to St. Niklaus
The next morning is filled with drizzle. We hope to get an early start to beat the crowds that now occupy the trail; our route now overlaps with the Tour of the Matterhorn. We fail and are behind large, meandering groups all day.

The rains quiet the woods; the pass is covered in snow again. Today we slide over and through the Augstbordpass, famous as a trade route from the Middle Ages onward between the Rhône valley and Italy. We don’t see much besides rime-covered sign posts and hints of the shattered walls of rock that surround us. It’s eerie and gorgeous, though we reckon less dramatic than if we could see through clouds.

The rest of the day is spent in the fog until, finally, we stop for lunch on a rock, waiting for the clouds to part. We’d learned that near this spot is one of the most breathtaking vistas on the entire two-week trek. What can we do but wait and hope that the god of itinerant travelers  grants us our wish? We must have wished halfheartedly, as the clouds part, but only briefly to reveal the enormous Dom.

Damn, it’s very brief! Shooting clouds rush through the valley, but we’re left wishing we had more time to sit and wait.

We are faced with the proposition of another knee-cartilage-shredding descent from Jungen to the Mattertal valley, a precipitous 2,700-foot drop in less than 2 miles. Our goal has, to this point, always remained the same—the Haute Route by two feet. So it is. “Down with lifts!” we mumble, our enthusiasm waning with the thought of surgery.

We forge downward, literally and figuratively. Brianna is more of a masochist than I had originally expected. Good for her.

For the first time our room has a TV but we refuse to watch it. Weren’t we supposed to be living in a tent? The luxury we’re subjected to when faced with limited choices in accommodations is alarming.

Continue to Part 5.

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