Asking for corn starch in Ausserferrera

Three days of rain on the Alpine Passes Trail teaches you things no packing list mentions. Wet shorts plus long distances equals chafing, and by the time we limped into Ausserferrera at the end of a 35-kilometre day, all four of us were walking like cowboys.

The known fix is baby powder. We had none, and Ausserferrera is a hamlet, not a place with a pharmacy. So we did what desperate people do and consulted the internet over dinner. The internet offered two field substitutes: starch, or chalk.

Which is how our waitress came to be asked, in a quiet Graubünden restaurant, whether she happened to have any starch or chalk. To her lasting credit she barely blinked. Climbers come here for the rock, she said, so climbing chalk could probably be found somewhere in the village. Then she went to check the kitchen anyway, and came back holding a box of corn starch.

We were long past dignity. All four of us took a share, disappeared in turns, applied. And it worked. It genuinely worked. The next morning we walked the final stage like hikers again, without a single cowboy in the group.

I have crossed 140 countries and packed for expeditions from the Sahara to Denali, and one of my most-repeated pieces of trail advice now comes from a kitchen shelf in a tiny Swiss village. Before every long hike since, someone in the group asks the same question at the packing stage: so, who is carrying the corn starch?