Haute Route Day 8 - Teleporting from Zinal to Gruben

Our goal on day 8 was to cross Les Diablons - the mountains to the east of Zinal - and descent to Gruben, a small summer-only farming hamlet in the next valley over.

The trouble was, the weather in the morning was as predicted: wet and stormy. Rain was one thing; lighting above tree line is quite another. Our options were, roughly:

• Wait it out. The weather got better in a day. Problem: our hut and hotel and flight reservations didn't have room for us to slip everything a day.
• Hike it anyway. Problem: maybe getting zapped by lightning.
• Take a bus to a funicular (uphill train) that would get us to the top of our side of the mountain, then hike down the other side. Problem: still maybe getting zapped because we'd still be hiking for 3-4 hours.
• Take public transport down the valley, up the Rhone valley, and then up the Gruben valley. Problem: Not much public transport in these valleys, so it would take all day with uncertain connections.
• Hire a taxi to take us the entire way. Problem: finding a taxi that would do that, plus, if that turned out to be possible, it would be kinda pricey.

So.. I phoned a friend.

Yes: Michele. She had our rental car and was staying in an AirBnB in Champéry about an hour's drive away. "Hey hon. Up for an adventure?" She helpfully agreed to come rescue us... so she had actually come to Zinal the night before, had dinner with us, stayed in the hotel, and then drove with us over to Gruben.

It would be a day of not hiking for us, which, in practice, we actually needed. Everyone was a little worn out, and Brian's knees could certainly use a break. A zero day would be just the thing to refresh us for the coming days.

The weather that morning. The black car is a taxi that another group hired. The cloudy mountains are where we descended on gondola in clear skies the day before.

We drove down to the Rhone Valley and then went over to Sion for lunch. Turns out that the Mountain Bike World Cup would be hosting the Slope Style competition in Sion in a few days, so we got to see the set up of the ramps for jumps that were all over the downtown area. Very cool!

From Sion, we drove up the valley, then went up the small valley to Gruben. The road was insane: one-lane, twisty, steep drop-offs, rainy, and foggy. I've been through a lot of this kinda stuff in the Alps and this one was right up there with the most complicated (paved) that I've driven.

We got to Gruben after about an hour of ascent on that road, where we dropped off Mark and Brian at our hotel (see them in the window).

But.. there's no way I was sending Michele back down that road alone in a rental car in those conditions. So I drove her back down to the lower valley.

... where she and I found a bakery for some much-needed pastry, and then she dropped me off at that public transport option I mentioned earlier. It started with a small regional gondola, where I met our friends Tina and Tomo, who had taken the public transport option to navigate around the storm.

It was a vaguely exciting trip on the small gondola on those small cables through the fog.

At the top of the gondola, we switched over to the one bus that went to Gruben that day, following the same narrow road I'd just driven twice. The bus wouldn't show up for another hour, so an enterprising taxi driver saw us and offered us a ride, which we took. It was nice to have someone else drive, someone who had clearly driven the road hundreds of times.

And we settled into Gruben for the night.

It was a little odd to have spent a day of the Haute Route not hiking, and certainly not within the constraints of a purist definition of the route. No regrets, though. We got there safely and we felt the recovery benefits of the Zero Day for all the remaining days of the Haute Route.

See Also

• Day 9 - Gruben to St Niklaus
• Haute Route overview
• Photos and stories from the other chapters of our 2025 Swiss trip