Via Alpina, July 17–August 8, 2022
By Amy Hackney Blackwell
In the summer of 2022, Chris and I walked across Switzerland.
I’m not exaggerating. We started at the eastern border with Liechtenstein, and we finished in Montreux, on Lake Geneva. It took us three weeks.
We hiked a route known as the Via Alpina, formerly called the Alpine Pass Route.
This trip was a long time coming. After our semi-disastrous Walkers’ Haute Route experience in 2018, we’d gone off the Alps for while. We headed to coastal France instead in 2019. But after a year to recover our equilibrium, we were ready to return to Switzerland. We contacted our favorite alpine travel agency, Alpine Exploratory, and booked the Via Alpina that January, along with plane tickets.
2020 didn’t happen. We would’ve gone if we’d been allowed to, but… no. We had Alpine Exploratory move our booking to the following year. (The Via Alpina season is quite short, late July to early September, so you can’t just do it whenever.) The plane tickets were a loss. Oh well.
2021 didn’t happen either. Once again, we would’ve done it if we’d been allowed to. Alpine Exploratory moved our booking one more year down the road.
By this point, hitting the Via Alpina had become something of an obsession with me. And in 2022, it finally happened. I even argued the airline into honoring the tickets we hadn’t used the previous year. We were good to go.
