Crossing the Alps

Seven weeks of ski mountaineering: of waking up, suffering through putting your frozen boots on and packing up the completely iced over tent. Of taking the weather as it is, spending entire days in complete whiteout, or being blown over by 120km/h gusts of wind and of waiting out storms in alpine huts, or (more often) on people's couches in​ the valley. But also seven weeks of being amazed by the ever-changing scenery, of being stunned by the beauty of snow-covered mountains every single day. A trip shaped by depending on people's hospitality and of incredible encounters with inspiring people. Of having conflicts with swiss railway employees, sleeping in goat stables and snacking days worth of sweets in supermarket entries. 
Seven weeks of pure, raw adventure, this is "Crossing the Alps", the story of Hugo and Linus trave​rsing Switzerland on skis.

How it all started

The story begins about a year ago, when Hugo and I met on Svalbard. Both trying to escape the dry university schedules back home, we landed all the way up north on this island in the Arctic, me studying Glaciology, and Snow Science, and Hugo taking guiding courses. We soon became close skiing buddies and decided to plan something for the next winter, when we would both be back on the European mainland. That something ended up being a two-month crossing of the Swiss Alps, and after an extensive planning period all autumn, on the first of February we found ourselves with a 26- and 29 kg backpack respectively (up to 50% of our bodyweight), taking a Bus out of Innsbruck to start our journey further up the valley.

Starting in Austria, we were well stressed. This was without a doubt the biggest adventure we both had yet dared to attempt. Two months of winter camping, of challenging the mountains, route finding and taking wise avalanche decisions out there seemed quite daunting, especially with the rather slim multi-day skitouring experience we had. On top of all that, we had had the idea to document all of it for a film, which neither of us had loads of experience with either. Luckily, we had Matteo, a friend from Svalbard with us for the first week, who was able to buffer some of our nerves with his calm and funny attitude.

One more question we were very afraid of getting the answer to was if Hugo's knees would hold up, since he had gotten double tendinitis in both knees just a couple months before the trip, and despite his best efforts of going to the physio every week and training it slowly, we weren't sure how it would react to this kind of load. This lead us to the decision of getting a head start with a gondola up the Stubai glacier on the first day, in order to ease into the effort as much as possible. But even with this measure taken, the first two days of descending into Sölden felt like quite a challenge, with the three of us struggling to manage the heavy backpacks on the downhill, and me breaking a pole on the very first evening.

But despite the challenges, we got a big confidence boost out of the first successful days, and started the second section over to Reschen from Vent with a big smile. After some route finding issues and a big detour, because our initial route choice had a section of snowed in via ferrata in it, we ended up in the Vernagthütte winter room, where we met Eva and Max, who were also out on a skiing trip and knew the region enough to help us make an alternative plan of how to get down to the Langtauferer valley. The next two days, we were blessed with beautiful weather and enjoyed our time up on the Guslar-, Kesselwand- and Gepatschferner, topping out at the Weißseespitze at 3532 meters. After bootpacking down a steep rocky ridge, and skiing out the horrible crusty snow into the valley, we unfortunately already had to say goodbye to Matteo, who took a train back home to France from here.

Hugo and I stayed down in the Inn-valley at the place of a couple we had contacted ahead of time. We started to think about our next section and soon ran into a problem. We didn't feel comfortable with the route we had originally planned, going over the Jamtalferner and Silvrettagletscher. Being only a rope team of two, and having seen the glaciers still quite poorly filled in this early in the season, we decided that we didn't want to take the risk, and to instead take the non glaciated Vereinapass to get over to Klosters.

A second attempt

One week later, and feeling a lot fitter again, we met in Sagliains, the exact train station, we had come back down to completely destroyed one week ago. This time, however, since we both weren't keen on giving the Vereinapass another shot, we decided to directly take the Flüelapass over to Davos. Since we didn't plan to cross any glaciers until the last two weeks on the Haute-Route, we made the call, to leave the glacier rescue kit and some other more technical gear at home, saving a couple kilos each. This made all the difference, and now being down to about 23kg each, we were able to progress a lot faster. After a night in Davos we headed over to Arosa, but since at this point, it had been dumping snow for 3 days, and we didn't have a safe way of proceeding from there, we decided to stay slightly above town, and enjoy the powder for some days :D

After two days of playing in the powder landing upside down a couple times, we both smiled from ear to ear, but had run out of food and therefore finally had to make our way into town. After satisfying the initial hunger with Swiss chocolate and cheese, we started looking for a place to stay for the night. Since we weren't lucky on Couchsurfing or Warm Showers this time, we had to find a different way. After some initial doubts, Hugo convinced me to go knocking on peoples doors, and boy am I happy we did. The very first door we tried was that of an old local couple, who were happy to let us sleep in their basement guest room, and not only were we able to dry and recharge all of our gear, but we also got to spend a lovely morning chatting about the town and the mountains with them.

Starting a bit later than planned, but well-fed with their homemade brioche, we made it over to Lenzerheide, and throughout the next days started our path towards Thusis, where we had another preplanned stay with a host family. As we texted them ahead of our stay we discovered that our hosts also happened to be skitourers, and that they were planning of skiing the very summit we were going to ski on the very same day. We organised to meet up there, and after a joyful ride skiing down all together in spring conditions, they drove us over to their place on the other side of the green valley. They were an incredibly welcoming and lovely family, and we enjoyed two days of cooking, playing board games, and going to a local art exhibition with them, as a nice variation on our normal daily routine, while a storm outside prevented us from continuing the tour.

Initially, the idea had been, to keep on going west for the next section, crossing the Greina plateau, and ending up in Disentis, but the weather forecast kept on looking really uninviting. With 140cm of fresh snow and wind gusts of up to 150km/h forecasted, we decided to not head into what felt like a death-trap to us and rather wait out the rest of the storm at Hugo's sister's place in Lugano. 3 days later, with the avalanche forecast still up at a 4 and no signs of the snow settling any time soon, with a heavy heart we decided to skip that section and keep on going from Disentis, where we could stick to the slopes for the next couple days until we felt like the avalanche situation was manageable again.

After crossing the Oberalppass, and slaloming between the tourists on the descent into Andermatt, we were headed towards the Furkapass, and out of civilisation again. We spent one night in a covered transformer house entrance and one in an empty goat shed, because by now we had both put up and taken down the tent often enough with freezing fingers to look for other options in the evening. Heading up to the Furkapass, one day was spent climbing in complete whiteout, navigating 10 steps at a time  with the GPS-Watch, we got really lucky with the weather! For the next days our main worry was avoiding to get sunburnt, which we managed decently well, and had an awesome and rather technical day over to the Tällistock. It was also the first day that we felt like we actually had to evaluate the slopes we were exposing ourselves to, by digging snowpits, and belaying each other into the more spicy sections. For the most part up to that point we had always picked a route that was either clearly safe, or we felt sketched out by the entire situation and stayed in a safe spot or in bounds. It felt good to gather information and make well thought-through descisions as the two of us, but it also made us be thankful to have had such safe and easy avalanche conditions, where we didn't have to put this effort in more regularily.

Up above the Rhône-valley, we spent our coldest night at -22°C without any major issue, and tackled the descent early the next morning. It was described to us as a beautiful, mellow 1400m descent, but with the mixture of warm sunny days and freezing cold nights, it had turned into a suncrusted hell, and both Hugo and I were struggling to stay upright on every single turn. At this point, we had both gotten the hang of descending with the big backpacks, and usually enjoyed the downhill quite a lot, but that day we were both happy to have made it down with ice-cold toes, but at least without serious injury.

The Haute-Route: a final challenge

From Zermatt, an approach day lead us to the Schönbiel hut, since we didn't want to take the shortcut with the Matterhorn-Express-Gondola, that people usually take when going east to west. The next day upon starting right underneath the majestic Matterhorn north-face, we spotted a group of 8 skiers on the glacier, which then made progress pretty easy, following their tracks, and knowing the crevasses had been freshly tested that day. Winding underneath impressive serracs and between scary crevasse imprints, we made our way to the highest point of the trip, the Tête Blanche at 3711m. From then on, a mellow descent on the Glacier du Mont Miné lead us towards the last small climb of the day up to the Cabane Bertol. From here on, we had planned to descend down into Arolla, but something was wrong on Hugo's boot, and upon closer inspection, we figured out that the cable in the boot's tightening system had snapped. Since it was already late, we decided to stay up at the majestic hut, and try to fix the boot before tackling the descent the next day. Talking about our trip and their experience up at the hut, we became friends with the two hut operators, Stéphane and Florence, who were super sweet and did everything in their power, to get us back on track. In return, and since we didn't want to ski an ice crust yet again, we decided to stay at the hut for the morning, and help the two cleaning and repairing their weather station. Unfortunately, we weren't able to fix the boot, but they gave us the contact of a sports shop down in Arolla that would maybe be able to help us.

Being back for a couple of weeks now, we both managed to slot back into our everyday life quite smoothly, but of course there are parts of the project still very much living on inside of us. All the amazing encounters with the inspiringly welcoming people, who welcomed us as strangers and sent us back on our journey as friends, make us smile every time we think back. And they were such an integral part to making this successful, we can't even thank everyone enough. Also, we're currently working on a movie, trying to condense the 35 hours of raw footage into a more watchable length.

But even now, several weeks later, I'm still in disbelief, when looking at a map and seeing the scale of what we have done. I mean shit yeah, we crossed Switzerland east to west on Skis :D