The Via Alpina 1, also known as the Alpine Pass Route goes east to west across Switzerland through the Glarner and Berner sections of the Alps for about 360 km, give or take some depending on options and starting point. I hiked along in mid September, 2018 with the loose, ambitious idea of completing it in a week. I didn’t make it to the opposite end but I did make a lot of other stuff. This here is a list of the aspects that left a lasting impression on me. It’s about the land, the mountains and the trail and it’s mostly about myself and how I was feeling at the time.
Traversing high above the Schachental
Top scenery
The Swiss Alps are the perfect postcard: massive rock walls, glaciers, waterfalls, meadows, woods, you name it. You can get just as beautiful but you’d need to split hairs to qualify for any better. The worst part of the Swiss Alps, scenery wise is that you may find hard to keep walking consistently, the temptation to stop and contemplate is often difficult to overcome.
Iconic Eiger north face
No wilderness
I already knew about this so it came to no surprise but I must comment on how much human print there is around the Via Alpina 1. It’s not a walk in the park but sometimes it looks like one.
Cable car and power line to the towering building on the secondary summit of Mt. Titlis
Undercover camping
The Via Alpina 1 is probably not the best place in the Alps to be camping around. The areas far from human activity along the trail are often limited to a very few miles before and after the passes, sometimes not even that. The alpine meadows below the passes are probably the quietest places to camp, also the most scenic. Get down from there and you’re probably bound for someone’s meadow.
Camping out is apparently not allowed officially anywhere in Switzerland but, again apparently tolerated in the usual circumstances about being non-intrusive and loosely strictly dawn to dusk.
With my tight schedule and all-you-can-hike strategy, I could not plan ahead and choose campsite area, not to mention a particular spot. I would camp wherever I was at day’s end. I camped 6 out of 8 nights, 4 of them in the wild and never had a problem to find a spot. My camps were often not the most scenic though.
Alpine meadow at the foot of the Wetterhorn
Crap pics
I can’t forget this one, I’m reminded every time I take a look at my archives.
Hiking style disclaimer: I wouldn’t devote much time to photography so I wouldn’t expect much about quality but the results were lacking even within those premises. I can argue the light patterns were tricky: the valleys are deep and aligned north-to-south so they were going straight from gloom to flat, hard sunshine and back to gloom, no magic hour unless I happened to be in the high areas. Flat, consistently blue skies didn’t help either, I wouldn’t have much cloud shape to play with.
Don’t be put off by my pics, the place is beautiful.
Swiss quality
It was my first real visit to Switzerland and I was witness to the excellent layout and to how well everything works: the trail system, the signage, the outstanding public transport system and how clean, tidy, spotless everything is, from towns to trails.
I can only speak from the perspective of a 1 week visit but it feels like a clear case of a reasonably well balanced society, i.e. a land that takes care of its people and people who take care of their land. I loved this part of travelling in Switzerland.
Sweat
If I must choose one word to define my time on the Via Alpina, that would be sweat. How unglamorous.
It was only two years ago that I was writing about how I had barely sweated at all during my trip in Iceland, not even while in my waterproofs, not even while working hard. I hadn’t become a mutant, it was surely due to the consistently cool and breezy environment of the far north. This is worth mentioning here for the huge contrast with my Via Alpina trip. This latter has seen me sweating my guts out as I had never experienced before to the point that it deserves this paragraphs.
Working uphill inevitably meant soaking all my clothing, particularly top and lower back. My hair was soon soaked too. At some point I almost had to stop using my poles as I needed both hands consistently wiping my forehead to avoid sweat into my eyes.
I don’t really know why this happened. Temperature wise, it was warm but not too much (upper twenties max) and I remember sweating buckets even in the early morning of an overcast day. The elevation gain was certainly a factor but nothing really different from any mountain terrain other than the length of the climbs.
I could blame my hiking layers. They were the same as in no-sweat Iceland: long trousers, long sleeve wool shirt, the very same actual items. They were perfect in Iceland, I had my reserves about both for the Alps and I think I turned out overdressed most of the time.
Clothing issues
I’m not happy with my hiking clothes selection for this trip. I chose long trousers and a wool shirt, exactly the same items that worked so well in recent trips in Iceland and Newfoundland but the Swiss Alps were too sunny, too warm and damp for comfort in such attire. Shorts and a lighter, synthetic shirt would have worked better. Sun exposure would have been manageable for the legs, probably not so for my arms so I’d have kept the long sleeve fashion.
Wool was not my best friend on this trip . It is very good at managing sweat or humidity in general, sweat in particular would impregnate the garment creating a sort of micro-climate that would cool me down in a time continuum without feeling cold but (and this is a big but) I’d sweat so much that it was uncomfortable beyond temperature perception. The shirt would often get so wet that it almost saturated, and that’s a lot to say about a fabric than can hold a big amount. Salt deposits would draw odd shapes all around the garment and these would shift everyday with the new waves washing away old deposits and creating new ones. This is as close as I’ve ever got to trail art. I should have taken pics of it.
I’d feel trapped in my hiking clothes sometimes. If I was to hike this route again anytime in summer, this is something I’d definitely change.
Sickness
I was sick on day 7 and possibly not at my best for some of the previous days. It was a mild version of the same condition that happened to me on my first trip in the Alps in 2009, same local bug maybe? Back in 2009 I went through vomit and diarrhea followed by two days where my body just refused to work. This time I luckily spared the vomit & diarrhea part, some heavy bloating instead and the body-not-working time was down to one day.
I kept hiking during that one day and I vividly remember the feeling of my body asking me to stop and rest. Walking felt increasingly difficult as if I couldn’t do it anymore. Still if I stopped and set myself in a comfortable position to rest I felt fine. My body wanted me to stop! I would feel sleepy, even while I walked, yawning included. In all those instances, it was my body begging for rest to fight whatever the bug it was.
Day 7 was shorter than usual and by far my hardest day of the trip. I made a dramatic effort to reach a basic, comfy alpine lodge where I just crushed at 6 pm, went to sleep right away and did so for 12 hours straight.
The following morning I was fine and in fact day 8 was probably the healthiest I felt on the whole trip which makes me think the sickness had been brewing on for longer than it showed.
No marathon pace
Not even close. I needed to average about 45 km/day to squeeze the whole thing in 8 days of walking. I knew it’d be tough, what I didn’t know is that after the toughness I’d only average 33 km/day.
I applied all the usual strategies known to me that always used to work: light, compact load, hike dawn to dusk, avoid long stops, avoid stopping many times, keep focused. I didn’t need to spend time route-finding as the way is so clearly marked, I barely played around with the maps, not even for landscape matching. I didn’t even tweet as I was too busy hiking. You can see it was for real.
This trip was brutal for me. I had never been so consistently worn out at the end of every single day in any hike before in my life. I lost 4 kg when I usually lose no weight at all in such trips. Whatever I achieved, I certainly gave it my best.
I still can’t explain why I couldn’t hike any further but I can think of a few factors: late summer shorter daylight time, sickness on day 7 and possibly not at my best on the days before.
Off line
Given the level of urbanization along the route, I wouldn’t be surprised if I had 4G reception all the way through but I didn’t even check.
This was an oddly welcome side effect of my hiking strategy that left me no time for anything else but hiking. It’s not only the actual sending out of a message or tweet that takes time off your day but the taking care of thinking what to produce, of selecting a pic or simply keep awareness of a certain, self-imposed duty and the related feedback. By having no brain slot available, I inadvertently freed myself from duty to the point that I didn’t even think about it. This was refreshing and liberating.
It’s not all drama about stretching the hiking to one’s limits.
Solitude sometimes is
The all-you-can-hike strategy strikes again in the form of high pass climbing in the off-peak hours of the evening where the few hikers left on the trail were all coming down to town or even in the late evening where I had the mountains to myself. This is an asset in a busy route like the Via Alpina 1.
The trail was not really crowded anytime, my mid-September window surely helped with that but it was only while still climbing high in these evening shifts that I got this feeling of solitude that’s so central to many backpacking pursuits and that I certainly appreciate. I fondly remember these times when I felt more intimate with the landscape, where the mountains looked bigger and I’d feel smaller.
It’s not all drama about stretching the hiking to one’s or the day’s limits.
Bunderchrinde pass, late evening
Self-inflicted Type 2 Fun1
There is often some sort of self-punishment in the Type 2 but this time my own responsibility was too obvious. I was going through villages, farms and huts, mountain lodges, mountain restaurants and a network of roads, railways and cable cars linking it all and I was just hiking past all these facilities. Their presence didn’t make things harder, it just made it all weird, I was feeling sweetly out of place in my hardships while the world around me was in a totally different vibe.
Type 2 fun often leads to the what-am-I-doing-here stage. It bears mention that this may happen anywhere and it’s not necessarily linked to deep isolation or remoteness which is certainly not the case in the Alps. When that question hits, you need valid answers. On my Via Alpina 1, it needed constant evaluation.
Finding balance
Walking and being on my own are two big factors in finding quality connection time with myself. The Via Alpina 1 was great for this as I could set the auto mode and let my mind go wherever it wanted while my feet were set in front of each other a million times. The physical challenge in the intended high mileage contributed to keeping me focused and determined. It was only one week walking but I found it brought great emotional balance to my life, a huge reset to get rid of the clutter, find clarity and take me on the way to the best version of myself.
Walking always has this balancing effect. This time it was outstanding.
Then I must admit I welcomed loosing those 4 kg.
RSS – Posts
Say what you want