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Ken Baldry's Alpine PagesMonte Rosa Rundtour - 2 |
Stage One - to Grächen's Hannigalp 1973
One gets off the Mattertal BVZ train from Brig at St. Niklaus 1116m, crosses the road & goes up the footpath to Grächen 1611m. This is very pleasant & avoids the road, which it occasionally crosses. If this is the first day of your trip, you can do this walk after the journey out, as we did.
St. Niklaus Station with the Ried Glacier in the background |
Ritinen Church on the path up to Grächen |
Grächen is well placed on a shelf above the Mattertal |
Hotel zum See above the village, where I would normally stay |
The Zum See was full so I asked the Chair Lift Man if the hut on the Hannigalp, 2114m was open. (It is perfectly practical to walk all the way up to the Hannigalp from St. Nick's in one afternoon, though. See our Grächen page on this link). Although he said yes, it wasn't but they let us stay because the Honour of the Village was at stake. Much to my surprise, they left us in charge of the cafe and just went at 1900. We chatted to the other tourists (my pidgin German was gradually improving), watched the sunset, did the washing up and turned in. The Hannigalp is the end of the Mischabel ridge & overlooks Visp. (2002 - This café is now closed but there is a big Ski restaurent which is also open in the Summer).
This is the author in 1973 outside the Hannighüsli |
On the Balfrin Hoheweg. I took few photos in 1973, as it was too gruelling. |
Stage Two - to Saas Fee 1973
We set off round the Balfrin Hoheweg early next morning. It was labelled Zerstort, cut off, and we found out why. The signpost time was five hours and someone had written, 6 ohne halte on the sign. It took us eight, even though it is mainly between 2000m and 2200m.
At one point just past the photo above right, the path had been avalanched off during the Winter (zerstort) and I had to do a tension traverse with the rope and then top-rope Jane across. Halfway round is a beautiful valley below the Balfrin Glacier but chunks of ice kept falling down, so we zoomed round that bit. The next section had been blanked off by the snow so we had to use our ice axes.It was a long, hard haul after that as it was hot and the path undulates so we staggered into Saas Fee, 1800m hot, smelly and exhausted. The path in crosses the Saas Fee Hannig Alp - the Swiss can be very unoriginal with place names!
There is much more detail on this gruellling stage on this link.
Saas Fee from Spielboden with the Lagginhorn behind |
Saas Fee from the North with the Alphubel behind |
We stayed at the Hotel Gletschergarten, which is more expensive than we would usually stay in but not many hotels were open so early. (I always stay there these days). If we had been carrying on that year, we would have walked down the path to Saas Almagell, 1672m for another half-hour & stayed there.
For more walks to do in Saas-Fee, see our site on this link.
Contact: Ken Baldry, 17 Gerrard Road, Islington, London N1 8AY +44(0)20 7359 6294 or e-mail him
URL: http://www.art-science.com/Ken/Alpine/Monte_Rosa/mr1.html Last revised 15/9/2015 © 1998-2015 Ken Baldry. All rights reserved.