Explorations

Haute Route Retrospective

A few thoughts on the amazing Haute Route, which we finished last week.

Haute Route Retrospective
A typically bland Haute Route view... Brian on the trail away from the Moiry Glacier and Hut.

In late August of 2025, Brian, Mark and I took 10 days to hike the Walker's version of the legendary Haute Route (see Wikipedia) that goes from Chamonix, France to Zermatt, Switzerland.

A week after the trip, I'm back in the States. The majesty of this hike continues to be with me. In this note, I'm capturing a few thoughts before they fade, and wrapping up a few loose ends.

TL;DR

Summary for the time-pressured:

Trip Summary

Before we started hiking, I wrote an overview blog that explained our plans and thinking behind the hike.

During the hike, I tried to upload photos and day summaries to an updates page, but with limited time and network access during the hike was only able to get about five days posted during the hike. If you were following that page and want to know how the other days played out, see below.

The Hike by Stage

These are the individual hikes by day.

Reflections

Simply put: this hike is easily in my top five multi-day trips I've ever done, including all those bike trips.

Among the things I loved:

  • just being in the high mountains - the rocky, snow peaks; the chilly breeze; the long views... just being
  • the ongoing journey connecting points I've known my whole life in new ways - the revealing of the next peak, the next alpine moonscape, the next glacier, the next waterfall, the next high pass, the next descent to a new village
  • long, hard hikes that free your mind and push your body
  • becoming acquainted with alpine huts and the long-distance hiking culture of Europe
  • the simple daily routine: rise, pack, eat, hike, rest
  • sharing this journey with like-minded friends

Questions Answered

Going back to some of the questions I had at the beginning of this trip and that I wrote into my blog from then:

Q: How does the whole Alpine hut thing work and can you actually get enough sleep in one to enjoy it?

Like I said to friends in an online chat, I think you can look at the huts as either absolutely horrendous hotels or luxurious backpacking.

In the horrendous hotels category:

  • You may be sharing sleeping space with many strangers, including snoring, lights coming on at 3am, rolling over and bumping into someone you don't know, etc.
  • After breakfast, there may be a line a dozen people long for the two toilets.
  • There might be wifi and Internet. There might be drinkable water. There might be power for charging your phone. There might be showers. There might be a private place to change clothes. Or... not.
  • You might have a choice in what food you are served for dinner. But probably not.
  • You and your friends might have your own dinner table to yourselves. But probably not.

But in the luxurious backpacking category:

  • You don't have to carry your food.
  • You don't have to carry camping gear.
  • You will have a place to get dry at the end of a rainy day.
  • You don't have to find a campsite.
  • You don't have to set up or tear down camp.
  • You don't have to cook meals and clean up afterwards.
  • There might be wifi and Internet. There might be drinkable water. There might be power for charging your phone. There might be showers. There might be a private place to change clothes.

So... if you're used to hotels and that's what you want, then huts will be tough.

But if you're used to backpacking and have expectations low, huts will feel like luxury - both during the day with lighter packs and at the end of the day when you have so much less to deal with.

On the sleeping thing - I found that with good earplugs (I'm using Ozlo earbuds) and a good eye mask, I slept just fine.

Q: Once you're used to huts, how does it change hike planning and options?

There are so many huts across the Alps... I didn't realize how many until this trip. This definitely changes my plans for future hikes in Europe, opening up options I didn't understand before. At the very least it makes it much easier to plan two-three day hikes to open up hike ranges that were infeasible before.

Q: The Haute Route has some scary sections. Long suspension bridges, unnerving ladders to navigate, and a few tough spots. How will we do?

The trails were long and tough, but not ridiculous. It's legitimately a "hike", not a "mountaineering expedition". There were a few moments here and there where a slip would have been disastrous, and some dicey moments for those with vertigo, but the vast majority of the trail is just standard alpine hiking trail.

Sadly, we did not get to the long suspension bridge because the trail after it is closed this year due to rockslide.. so we don't know for sure how we would have done on that, although at this point (having done some shorter ones) I'm pretty sure we would have been fine.

And, also sadly, the ladders were closed as noted in "Day 6 - Arolla to the Moiry Hut", so we didn't get to try those.

Q: Do I have the right strategy for what to take in the day pack and what to take to the huts?

Yeah, no real issues, and nothing on my packing list that I'd change much. Having day hiked and backpacked a lot helped considerably for gear choices.

Q: I'm processing a lot of stuff right now, including what to do next... how does 10 days of hiking influence that?

Interestingly, I found myself spending a lot more time soaking in the moments of the hike than lost in my head thinking about stuff. It was kind of wonderful. I didn't come out of the hike with any new or big decisions related to life, other than "yeah, I've got to do something like this hike again".

A Few Other Observations and Thoughts

The Officialness and Completeness of the Haute Route

There isn't quite an official Haute Route. There's no governing authority that will send you a badge if you complete it. There are books, there are patterns, there are customs.

The normal biggest full version of the Haute Route is fourteen days. You can hike every step of the whole thing, you can take trains and gondolas for some, and you can skip entire days. At some point, it's no longer the Haute Route, but it's not clear when that happens.

We did not hike every step of the trails from Chamonix to Zermatt. We took ten days and hiked the sections that were the best and most available at the time, and we used other options including gondolas, trains, buses and cars where those made the most sense. It was most definitely still The Haute Route.

At first it kinda bugged me that we weren't walking the whole thing. In retrospect, I'm glad we did the version we did. It fit into the time we had available. We skipped some very skippable sections. We used gondolas to bypass forgettable downhills and to save our knees. Right call.

I do wish we had been able to hike the last two days from St. Niklaus into Zermatt per tradition, but with the trail closure that was quite a bit more difficult to do well.

I am actually inclined to go back and do some of the things we missed at some point. That to-do list looks like this:

  • The Pas de Chèvre (the ladders)

  • The Europatrail (the last two days into Zermatt, including the suspension bridge)

  • Zinal to Gruben (the day we missed due to the thunderstorm) and then further day hikes into the beautiful high valley above Gruben

Zero Days

We had an unplanned zero day (non-hiking day) on day 8 due to the thunderstorm. In retrospect, that was a really good thing for us. We needed that break.

For future trips, I'm inclined to proactively schedule a zero day in every five to six days. I'd book two nights straight in a hut or hotel and then plan to just stay there for a day to rest, catch up on things going on in the world, go on very easy strolls, or have a buffer built into the logistics so that if we did have to wait out the weather, we could do it without shuffling every reservation we had planned (which is impossible).

Solitude

Not a thing in the Alps. It took me a while to figure this out and get used to it.

In the US (and elsewhere) when I've been backpacking, I've grown to count on getting to places where our hiking group is completely alone - sometimes for days. You get out of "day hiker zone" by day 2 or 3, and then you spend days in places where few go. You leave civilization behind and wallow in it.

Whereas in the Alps, you're never more than a few hours away from a restaurant, a hotel, a gondola, a bus, or a parking lot full of hikers. And the trails are never vacant. If you're used to and looking for solitude and wilderness, at best it's weird, and it can be outright disturbing.

I think this is just something you get used to. Or not. On the 3rd day of hiking, this was driving me a little crazy. By the end, I was ok with it... but I did miss the solititude time.

Hiking Community

A side effect of the easy access to the mountains and of the huts and well-known routes is that you may well be doing the same trip that other people are (at least for a few days). You see them in the same huts at meals, and you may cross paths with them on the trails.

It's a little bit weird, and a little bit cool.

We came to know and recognize some of the people in the guided tour group that started in Chamonix on the same day as us, and who had roughly the same hut and hotel schedule that we did up to about day eight. They're in some of our photos.

Starting somewhere around day four, we shared rooms, meals, and trails with Tina and Tomo from Slovenia. They're awesome. We've traded photos and hints on the route. We established email contact with them and hope to see them in the future.

Hike Type In Comparison

As I puzzled through how to think about this solitude thing, along with the hike style changes enabled by having alpine huts, I've come to think of the hiking options in these three categories:

  • Supported hut hiking: Stay in huts or hotels every night. Carry only what you need for a day hike. Have you other stuff in a suitcase that is transported between hotels for you by some taxi. This results in the most enjoyable days as you have very little on your back for the hikes.

  • Self-supported hut hiking: Stay in huts or hotels every night. Carry all your stuff. You don't need food or camping supplies, but you do need extra clothes, stuff for sleeping in huts, and probably some minor cooking things.

  • Backpacking: Stay in tents that you carry, setting up camp every night. Buy food and meals along the way. Stay in a hut if you want to escape the weather. This is the cheapest and perhaps most flexible way to hike the Alps, and also the one with the heaviest load on your back.

We did the first option: supported hut hiking. We could afford it and it made the most sense by a long shot for our first such trip. I liked it and probably would do that the most, but I'm open to the other options and will keep them in mind when planing future adventures.

Gratitude

This hike reminded me of so many things I'm thankful for in this great big world... a few of those, related to this hike:

  • Brian and his knees made it! We'd been worried since about November, but with all kinds of preparation, the braces, and him being careful and moderate on the trails despite the examples set by Mark and I, he made it through the whole hike.

  • To Mark and Brian for the rock solid, steady, and trustworthy companionship on this hike and in life. Ten days together, with so many points where things could have a gone south - missed trails, hard climbs, cramped quarters, tough decisions... and we weathered it all calmly and in good spirits together.

  • To Alpinehikers, the touring company we worked with to set up the routes, arrange hotels and luggage transport, and help with logistics during the trip if needed. Alpinehikers has been organizing trips that Michele and I have been on since 2022, and they've been fantastic.

  • To Michele, for decades of enthusiastic support she's had for me doing this kind of thing.. and in particular in this trip, for the drop-off in Chamonix, the pick-up in Zermatt, and the mid-trip rescue from thunderstorms.

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