Switzerland: Haute Route to Zermatt

I left Chamonix on 12 September 2018 with an ambitious goal: to walk the Haute Route to Zermatt, alone, on foot, carrying everything I needed to sleep outside. I’d been to Zermatt many times before—weekend ski trips from Geneva, familiar restaurants, familiar streets, familiar views. What I wanted this time wasn’t familiarity. It was an expanded and earned perspective.

By the time I reached Zermatt eighteen days later, I’d logged 480,805 steps and 292.8 km, crossed 11 high mountain passes (average around 2,900 meters), and climbed roughly 8,973 meters in combined ascents—an Everest’s worth of vertical effort if you start counting at sea level. Two sore knees. Thirty-six protein bars. And a mind that had been quietly rearranged by altitude, silence, and the steady discipline of putting one boot in front of the other.

Most guides describe the Walker’s Haute Route as roughly 180–200 km, often done in about two weeks, with a predictable rhythm of village-to-village accommodation. I saw Walker's because there is also a ski touring haute route. My own version ended up being closer to 300 km not because I got lost (though the Alps have a way of nudging you toward detours), but because I kept stopping. I kept looking. I kept wandering down side valleys and lingering in villages that didn’t feel like places you should rush through. The point, after all, wasn’t to “complete” the route. The point was to live inside it for a while.

Departure: A Soft Start, and a Harder Promise

The first day was almost comically gentle: Chamonix to Argentière, a short walk that felt like clearing your throat before a speech. I knew Argentière from earlier ski seasons in the valley—one of my favorite skiing destinations in the Chamonix Valley, with incredible off-piste runs.

It was also one of my last nights in a real bed. I stayed in a hotel, partly because I could, and partly because I suspected it would become a luxury I got used to the trail. In the morning, I climbed toward the Col de Balme, that high boundary between France and Switzerland above Le Tour. There’s something satisfying about crossing a border on foot, especially when the “border” is really just a saddle of rock and air. You don’t present a passport. You present your lungs.

After the pass, I dropped into Switzerland—down past high refuges and spiraling trails toward Trient. And that’s where my preferred version of this hike began.

Sleeping Without a Roof

Most Haute Route pages include a line that sounds reassuring and faintly institutional: Accommodation: refuge, dormitory, evening meal and breakfast. I left in September for the opposite reason. I wasn’t looking for dormitories, roof beams, or chatter over shared tables. I wanted distance from human noise. I wanted the uncomplicated company of the mountains. I wanted to just find a place to sleep wherever the evening found me.

I didn’t bring a tent—just a bivouac sack to protect the sleeping bag, and a setup that amounted to: find flat ground, crawl in, watch the sky until sleep takes over. Meals were equally minimalist: cheese, nuts, raisins, bread, tuna, granola, protein bars, and the kind of trail food that makes you appreciate a tomato like it’s a miracle.

The first time I cut a few meters off the trail and laid out my sleeping bag in the open, the sun dropped “suddenly” in that alpine way—light disappearing as if someone had pulled a curtain behind a ridge. Twilight lingered, but the horizon was all mountain, and the mountain always wins.

It should be noted that sleeping outside in Switzerland occupies a quiet grey zone—neither explicitly encouraged nor outright forbidden—and understanding that nuance is part of traveling responsibly through the Alps. In Switzerland, wild camping (pitching a tent for multiple nights) is generally restricted and often prohibited, particularly above the tree line, within protected areas, and inside national parks. However, discreet bivouacking—arriving late, leaving early, using no tent, and leaving no trace—is widely tolerated in high alpine terrain, provided it is done respectfully and away from settlements, trails, and sensitive environments. Enforcement is largely cantonal, and the unwritten rules matter as much as the written ones: avoid livestock areas, never camp near huts or villages, and treat the mountains as shared, fragile space rather than personal wilderness. On this journey, sleeping outside felt less like an assertion of freedom and more like a temporary borrowing of ground—an agreement with the landscape to pass quietly through, unseen and unchanged by morning.

It should be noted that sleeping outside in Switzerland occupies a quiet grey zone—neither explicitly encouraged nor outright forbidden.

Fenêtre d’Arpette: The Tough Way, and the Reward

The following day I took the Fenêtre d’Arpette variant—steep, exposed, and regularly described as a more difficult option that should be avoided in bad conditions. It’s the kind of climb that doesn’t allow much daydreaming. Your world reduces to rock, breath, and the next step. And then, inevitably, the Alps hand you something for your trouble.

For me, it was an incredible double rainbow that presented itself just as I reached the pass—one of those moments where the mountains stop being merely “beautiful” and become oddly personal, as if the landscape is responding to your effort with a private signal: yes, keep going.

A magnificent double rainbow presented to me by the mountains as a reward for having made it to the top of the Fenêtre d’Arpette pass.

Along the way, I posted photos of flowers on my social media accounts with the hashtag #DailyFlowers4Mom, a daily ritual for my mother -- and one I have continued for many years since this hike. It’s a small thing, but it does something important: it forces me to notice details. Not just the grand drama of glaciers and passes, but the precise, stubborn beauty of alpine life that persists in thin air. Beauty is, after all, in the details.

In September, there were still flowers galore all along the 300 km of Haute Route from Chamonix to Zermatt.

The Night of the Bells

As I left the Fenêtre d’Arpette and descended downwards towards Champex the rainbow disappeared leaving just the rain. The sun set, the trail narrowed and the light dissipated into that headlamp world where everything beyond the beam is imagination. I found myself again below the tree line, as the forest grew taller with every step. Exhausted, I found a vaguely flat spot under a tree—dry-ish, sheltered, and inconveniently right on the trail. I told myself I’d wake at first light to avoid being stepped on. I climbed deep into my sleeping bag, protected by the bivouac sac and laid there remembering the day. Then I heard it: bells.

At first it was distant and almost musical, a scattered clanging echoing up the valley. It was soothing enough that I drifted toward sleep.

And then the bells grew louder.

The “lullaby” turned into a moving wall of sound, and I sat bolt upright with the sudden realization that I wasn’t alone on the trail. A herd was coming up.

I packed in seconds and started walking down into the noise because backtracking up the mountain was not an option. The trail was narrow, water flowing down on one side and a steep embankment on the other. Not long after, the trail opened up and I saw what looked like a floating constellation of beady yellow eyes in the dark, bodies still half-hidden until I was close enough to feel the scale of them.

A short video of my encounter with the cows.

They were Hérens cattle—the compact, muscular Valais breed known for their horns and fighting instinct. The cows are famously used in organized cow-fighting traditions to establish hierarchy. In daylight, they’re striking. At night, in rain, with their eyes catching your headlamp, they look intimidating. They were cows, but they carried themselves like bulls.

I talked to them in a calm voice—the way you talk to anything large that could ruin your evening if it decided to. And I threaded through the herd, step by careful step, until the eyes were behind me and the bells became distance again.

Soon thereafter, I found an old abandoned building and slept under an overhang—still outside, still hearing theweather, but grateful for a scrap of shelter.

Glaciers, Moraines, and a Changing Mountain

The Haute Route is a geography lesson you feel in your knees: lakes tucked under rock walls, braided rivers, moraines like scars, glaciers receding above as the climate crisis changes the landscape, sometimes in dramatic fashion.

On the trail I met a Swiss mountaineer, Jean-Daniel Volery, and we talked about what warming is doing to the Alps—how thawing permafrost can destabilize rock, making slopes and faces more prone to collapse. It wasn’t abstract. It was a conversation happening in the middle of a landscape that has always seemed permanent.

Since then, the warnings have only gotten louder: thawing permafrost is increasingly linked to rockfall risk, instability around routes and huts, and larger collapses in alpine regions. Walking through these valleys, you can’t avoid the impression that the Alps are not simply “there.” They are active. They are changing. And sometimes—quietly, relentlessly—they are coming apart.

In May 2025, the Alps delivered one of the starkest reminders yet that these mountains are not timeless relics but evolving forces of nature. In the Lötschental valley of the Swiss canton of Valais, the small village of Blatten—a community that had stood for centuries—was almost entirely buried when a massive section of the Birch Glacier (Birchgletscher) collapsed, sending millions of cubic meters of ice, rock and mud down the valley and obliterating roughly 90 percent of the settlement. The village had been evacuated hours earlier after weeks of warning signs and smaller rockfalls, but one person remained unaccounted for amid the devastation. What makes the event resonant for anyone who knows these mountains on foot is the scale and speed of the change: terrain that had seemed permanent simply reorganized itself in seconds, damming the Lonza River, creating new flood risks downstream, and forcing officials and scientists to reckon anew with how warming temperatures, melting permafrost and unstable slopes are reshaping Alpine environments in the present, not some distant future. But Jean-Daniel Volery had warned of this seven years previously, as you will hear in this video:

Watch my one-minute interview with Jean-Daniel Volery, where he foretells of the devastating landslide seven years later near Blatten. He speaks in French, then I explain what he says in English.

Swiss Encounters, and the Quiet Irony of Geneva

One of the more ironic truths of this trek: I met and spoke with more Swiss people in these three weeks on foot than I had in the previous decade living in Geneva.

Geneva is international by design—full of civil servants, diplomats, expats, finance, and the hum of global business. The mountains, by contrast, felt locally Swiss in a way the city rarely does. People said hello, offered a comment about weather, asked where I’d come from, and then let you pass without drama. Brief human contact—clean, kind, and unforced.

One day, I met a hiker named Thomas Gaillard, a former soldier from Lausanne, and filmed a little exchange about Swiss Army knives and the missing corkscrew: the official logic being that Swiss soldiers shouldn’t be opening wine on duty—paired, of course, with the very Swiss workaround that everyone learns to open a bottle with “just the knife anyway.” I shot a quick video exchange with him and uploaded it to my social media:

Former Swiss Soldier Thomas Gaillard explains why the real Swiss Army Knife does not have a corkscrew.

Arolla, La Sage, and the Alps as a Film Set

Later, after the long high-country walk crossing passes like Col des Roux, contouring above Lac des Dix, then up again toward Col de Riedmatten and down into the Val d’Hérens—the village of Arolla felt like something the mountains had built to prove they can do delicate as well as brutal.

I remember the Hotel du Glacier as a particular kind of relief: not just a roof and flowers, but a psychological pivot after so many nights of improvised sleeping spots. The area was so picturesque it triggered that familiar mental reflex—expecting the Sound of Music soundtrack to swell from somewhere off-camera.

And then there was La Sage—a name that landed softly because it’s also my son’s name. Travel has a way of handing you these small coincidences like quiet gifts, the kind you don’t post as “meaningful,” but you carry anyway.

Day 14: A Trail Companion Appears

By the second week my routine had settled into something almost monastic: wake with the light, pack, climb, descend, eat, repeat. The mind does interesting things when it has long stretches without conversation. Sometimes it thinks about life in big, sweeping arcs. Sometimes it practices thinking about nothing at all.

And then, on Day 14, I met Dennis Berzhanin—an American Financial Advisor from New Jersey living near Frankfurt, carrying the kind of youthful energy that makes steep climbs look like a preference rather than a problem. He had cans of Monster Energy in his pack and sipped them on ascents. I nicknamed him “MonsterMan,” and from then on the hike had a different rhythm: not quieter, but shared.

It’s a strange thing, how quickly companionship can form when two people are doing the same hard thing and sleeping outside for the same reason. You don’t need much backstory. The trail becomes the backstory.

Meet Dennis Berzhanin, a.k.a. MonsterMan

Zermatt: Anticlimax, and Then Something Better

Walking into Zermatt on Day 18 was, oddly, an anticlimax. No finish line. No applause. No chorus of strangers shouting “You made it!” Just tourists, trinket shops, the normal machinery of a famous alpine village going about its business.

And yet—this time, Zermatt looked different.

I’d been there dozens of times before. But arriving on foot after nearly 300 km made the place feel earned. I’ve always known that a summit view is different when you hike up rather than take a gondola. I hadn’t realized the same thing could be true of a village.

Dennis and I ate an actual restaurant meal—Italian, because after trail food for weeks, pasta feels like civilization—and then I headed for the train back to Geneva.

As the train dropped down toward Sion and rolled out through the Valais, the compression of scale was almost absurd: what had taken 18 days now took a few hours. Out the window, I recognized passes and ridgelines I’d crossed on foot, now reduced to scenery.

But inside, something had expanded.

My body was stronger, yes—more upright, more confident, forged by repetition. More important was the quieter shift: the way solitude in the mountains strips away the excess noise you didn’t realize you were carrying, and replaces it with something harder to describe and easier to recognize when you feel it.

The Haute Route didn’t “change my life” in the cliché way travel writing sometimes reaches for. It did something better: it returned me to myself—leaner, calmer, and a little less impressed by urgency.

And when I think back to those nights under the open sky—clouds rolling like slow ocean swells above a ridge, steep climbs that make the legs sting—I can still hear the bells. Not as a threat this time, but as proof that the Alps were alive around me, even in the dark.