Starting mid September, I’ll be hiking on the Via Alpina 1 all the way across Switzerland. Background, motivation and rough plan below.

Love/Hate

The Alps are magnificent mountains. Scenery wise, they’re as good as you can get. The hiking is excellent and the route opportunities are endless, nevermind the glaciers. From a hiker’s perspective, this is paradise with a major twist: there’s no real wilderness.

This may be a big bummer for a backpacker that likes self-reliance and being away from the human things, if only for an extended while. No such thing in the Alps: if it’s not the villages and roads it’s the cable cars, the ski resorts or the mountain huts turned lo-fi hotels.

It’s basically for this reason that I’ve only hiked once in the Alps before. I missed the wilderness, I loathed the camping restrictions, where there were some, and I loved everything else. I knew I should be back.

A valley year

For hiking at least. In 2018 my biggest trip will be on two wheels1, which is something I do every once in a while with the side effect that I don’t have time left for a multi-week hiking trip. There’s a lot of interesting stuff that can be done in a week though, as it’ll be the case in this instance.

Switzerland

It’s a key name in mountaineering mythology. When I was a child I’d see the books, the documentaries or the postcards and I wanted to go there. By the time I became aware of my identity as a mountaineer (the wilderness long distance hiking), my enthusiasm about Switzerland lessened but I knew I had to visit sometime, see those mountains and make the postcards go real.

Swiss place names set

A trail to walk

The trail network provides a framework that’s a bit constricting with some positive aspects to it. Hiking on consistently good trails is right on the opposite of my previous long distance trip where I was mostly cross-country. Hiking where there are no trails feels like the most 4Real thing I could do but it demands a lot of work, both physical and mental and I’d sometimes miss the sweet abandon of following a track and leave my mind wander.

It feels fine to go trail-bound this time. There were many things happening this year and I’ll welcome the time to think. Also this year there was a new Turin Brakes record that I need to hike along to fully understand. It’ll be in my head as I walk.

A to B

I love the sense of travelling across the land and see how far a hiker can go. This is central to my motivation for getting out there. The Via Alpina 1 is a perfect match as it traverses a certain unit, be it socio-political more than physical but it somehow feels nice to go across a whole country in one go. The excellent Swiss public transport system makes linear routes easy to plan.

Direction of travel

East to West is the way I had always pictured this trip, maybe because it’s like getting closer to home as I walk. It’s good that the relevant Cicerone guidebook follows the same direction. If there’s a Cicerone guidebook for something, I usually look no further.

Go west.

Challenge

Not the logistics neither the route finding will be demanding on this trip and who knows about the weather but there’s always room for a good challenge that adds perceived value to the journey. In this case it goes with the previous point about the wide-scale travelling feel and the fact that fitting the Via Alpina 1 in one week will indeed be challenging, requiring me to hike beyond 40 km everyday. No sporty feats, I’ll just keep walking, relax and see how far I can go.

Happy hiker bound for the Alps

It feels odd to be thinking of this trip when I should be focused on my upcoming month-long cycling journey but I need to get the basics ready for the Via Alpina now, it’ll be only a few days gap in between trips. At this point you get to appreciate a simple approach to backpacking where all the planning means flight tickets into Zurich and out of Geneva and a hostel night in Zurich upon arrival. The rest is just walk-camp-repeat.

The whole thing is Sargans to Montreux. If I make it, I’ll hug Freddie Mercury before going back home.

  1. Content in Spanish