The Walkers’ Haute Route
The Walkers’ Haute Route is a high-altitude trek from Chamonix to Zermatt, connecting two world-famous Alpine resort towns by a long-distance trek that runs south of the Rhone Valley up and over multiple mountain ridges and through multiple valleys. It’s famous for having some of the most beautiful, wild scenery of any trek through the Alps.
It’s also HARD. Alpine Exploratory lists this as the hardest of their Alpine treks by some measure. Unlike the TMB, the Haute Route doesn’t go through many towns with restaurants and hotels. There are no charming cafés with WCs, though there are lots of rocks to pee behind. The paths aren’t as well-trodden, and in some parts they aren’t completely clear. The distances are long with no easy outs, and often there are no realistic ways to shorten stages.
The route crosses lots of passes. Some passes are broad and flat and fairly easy to tackle. Others are high, steep, loose, and very narrow at the top. Those are scary and difficult.
There is exposure. Though some of the scarier bits can be eliminated – the Europaweg on the last two days is one section some people choose to edit – some can’t. (One of my recurrent fantasies is getting to a section of trail on which I become completely paralyzed, unable to more forward or backward. I will just die there, and future hikers will have to walk past my skeleton.)
There are sections of ladders. See above re: exposure. Though we had no difficulty with ladders on the TMB, the ladders at the Pas de Chèvres (goat path) occupied my brain on multiple sleepless nights before we arrived in Switzerland. (If I’d seen this 2023 video before booking, I might have chosen another hiking trail! It’s not the ladders that frighten me so much as the cliff-edge trail they hike to reach them.)
There’s an alternative to the Pas de Chèvres called the Col de Riedmatten, which is said to be even higher and so steep and loose it’s hardly easier (i.e., safer) than those ladders. (As it happened, we didn’t hike that section, so all my pre-trip fretting was for naught.)
There is scree. There are boulders. The TMB doesn’t have much of that high mountain rocky terrain, so I had no idea what we’d be facing on this route. Higher passes can be steep and loose, i.e. fields of deep scree at pretty vertical slopes. That stuff is hard to walk on and presents a real danger of slipping. The Europaweg is notorious for rocks falling from above – a risk that’s impossible to mitigate. (Hikers are advised to just walk fast.) This terrain has the added benefit of being kind of ugly.
Even where the walking is straightforward, there are large sections that are hours away from any civilization or aid. Distances can be shockingly long.
Really, no one should belittle the Walkers’ Haute Route.
Were we up to it? Probably. We didn’t walk the whole thing, so there’s no telling. My guess is that if we had both been in good health, I would’ve been scared some of the time, we both would’ve disliked walking on gravel, we would’ve been tired a lot, and we would’ve made it through just fine. But we’ll never know.