Gruben to Grimentz

Gruben to Grimentz

Everyone spoke German at breakfast. By lunch, everyone spoke French.

The switch happens on the Meidpass at 2,789 metres, and it is abrupt enough to feel staged. Not a bilingual blur, not a slow drift. A line drawn across one ridge, with grüezi on one side and bonjour on the other.

You leave from the Turtmanntal, which empties completely every winter and runs four buses a day in summer, booked by telephone the evening before. The climb out is honest rather than hard: forest, then high pasture, then the tarn at Meidsee below the crest, then a stretch of loose rock to the pass. Nothing exposed, nothing chained. It is the reason this weekend grades T2 and the reason it is the one to hand somebody walking their first pass.

Standing on the far side is the Hotel Weisshorn: white, 1882, at 2,337 metres, visible for an hour before you reach it. Half the people on its terrace walked up from the valley purely to eat, which tells you what the kitchen is worth. The menu du jour runs to four courses and finishes with blueberry pie.

Day two is a balcony. An hour of gently rolling trail on the Sierre-Zinal race line, with the Zinalrothorn, the Dent Blanche and the tip of the Matterhorn arranged across the valley, then 1,130 metres down through larch into Ayer and along an old irrigation channel into Grimentz: geraniums on sun-blackened larch, granaries on staddle stones, a long lunch earned.