Half a Haute-y High in the Alps

                                                                    

  Haute Beginnings

Jerry stood at the col, his silhouette framed against the clouded and darkening late afternoon sky. It would take a while longer for me and the other three skiers in our group to take in the sights that Jerry was pondering from his spot in that gap in the rock of the Alps, the pass that led to the hut we would be staying in for the night on our abbreviated two-night, three-day Italian version of the Haute Route, a sort of half a haute.

We’d come a long way via vehicles from Italy that day, but the road ended at the “little” Swiss ski area of Allora. A big coach bus brought as far as it could go to the base of the cirque. A small wooden ticket booth, a very small parking lot, and a couple of green plastic port-a-potties comprised the base area. It only had a couple of thousand feet of vertical rise and three Poma lifts.  For $10 one of those lifts got us a lot closer to the col; but only so close.

Above Allora, towards the col

We stepped into our skis, slipped on packs, slid through the entrance gate and put the round, flat disc and bar attached to the cable of the Poma lift between our legs and began ascending into the white Alps under warm, blue skies. 

We skied past the last lift and off the piste (ski run).  The massive wall of a deep blue glacier towered a thousand feet above the beginning of our tour.  We put on our climbing skins and harnesses and switched on our avalanche transceivers.  The skins, with their short, one-way hairs and ski base-adhering glue allowed us to climb up the slope in smooth, gliding steps with heels free to lift up for the next step up.  Jerry was soon on his way, excited to be climbing into new mountain heights. The ever-jovial Doug and I chugged along together.  After about a half hour on this one-hour uphill ski, Doug uttered the refrain I’m sure he had said in mock surprise on other tours with Jerry, “Is that Jerry at the col already?” No he wasn’t quite there, but he was close, and when we arrived we saw what he was looking at.

Dix Hut in the center of picture on the rocky outcrop

From the col we could see the dark Cabane de Dix where we would be staying for the night about a mile distance, looking small upon a white hill nestled inside the massive cliff-rimmed white expanse of an upper valley in the Swiss Alps.

But more immediately we saw below us not a run down the other side as is so often the case at a col. No, here the slope tapered down gently for a couple of meters, and then there was a near-vertical two-hundred foot cliff with a couple of metal bars poking up. Despite Doug’s humorous incredulousness of Jerry’s matter-of-fact statement that we would be descending ladders, there they were as we peaked over the cliff—metal ladders bolted to the rock going straight down. We strapped our skis and poles onto our packs and took out some carabineers with which to click onto the ladder rungs for safety.  Unfortunately, only one carabineer amongst all the ones the five of us carried had a large enough circumference to fit around the rungs of the ladder.  The lone female in our group, Stephanie, got the use of it. And so we descended one by one with white-knuckle grip upon the ladder’s rungs. As if a straight down climb in ski boots and packs wasn’t enough, half way down we had to step across a two foot-wide gap of empty space as the alignment of ladders shifted on the face of the cliff.

In the soft snow below the cliff, recomposed, we put on our skis for the traverse and climb across the blank, treeless valley to Dix.  I lagged, as I often do when the end is in sight and I know there is a bit of time to shuffle through and be content in the peaceful presence of nature.

 Sometimes I think all outdoor recreation is just an excuse for modern man to be amidst nature.  Some outdoor sports suit people more or less, some evince the passions in different ways; all seem to imbue people with a peace that we instinctively desire. 

Perhaps I took it slow because I was nervous about never being in a mountaineers hut as all my cohorts had, perhaps I was tired, perhaps I was nursing my sore shin with its gel-padded bruise, and perhaps I just didn’t believe Marco that there would be beer in a hut in the middle of winter where there were no roads.  But this my friends, is Switzerland.  There was beer.  And I found a place for my things and drank.