Postcard from Switzerland: an off-piste adventure . . . in June

On Wednesday morning last week, Heathrow’s Terminal 2 was busy with passengers departing for summer breaks everywhere from Stockholm to San Francisco, but I think I was the only one carrying skis.

Skiing, as I’ve written before, is a slippery slope. It starts as an innocuous, one-week-per-year family holiday but can quickly become an obsession, driving you to obscure places and extreme lengths in search of snow. Social media has made it worse — from December until Easter, feeds are full of shots from the mountains, ensuring almost constant Fomo for those stuck at their desks. 

This year, though most Alpine ski resorts closed in April, the shots kept coming: fresh snow piling up on outdoor tables, tree branches bending under a white mantle, skis throwing plumes of powder into the sky. A series of late storms meant that winter seemed to be refusing to release its hold on the Alps. Engelberg in Switzerland got more than two metres of fresh snow at the end of April; in May, more snow forced the Giro, Italy’s national cycle race, to be rerouted.

I was on a beach in Cornwall, on a summer half-term break with my kids, when I got a message from Dan Loutrel, a mountain guide friend based in Switzerland. Conditions were looking good for the following week, should we go skiing?

And so, on June 5, I found myself packing Gore-Tex and down jackets into a bag that still had sand in it, and flying to Zurich for a discombobulating three-day break. Of course, there are a handful of ski areas that operate every summer, usually a few pistes up on a high glacier, typically used for slalom racers to train (ironically, the opening of one of them, Stelvio in Italy, has been delayed this summer because too much snow closed the access road). Our trip would be very different, an off-piste adventure, using skins attached to our skis to climb through the high mountains in search of cold snow and wild slopes.

At Zurich airport I left my travelling clothes in a locker and caught the train to Zermatt in an eccentric outfit: flip flops, shorts and rucksack, skis and boots in hand. A warm breeze blew in the open windows as the train made the final pull up the Mattertal valley, clouds of wildflowers covering the banks alongside, but up high the mountain tops sparkled white.

The following morning, Europe’s highest cable car took us up to the Klein Matterhorn (3,883 metres above sea level), injecting us straight back into winter. From there we struck out east into the Monte Rosa massif, traversing wide-open snowfields, my skis falling into a steady rhythm behind Dan’s. Off to the right we could look down into the green valleys of northern Italy, the villages of Champoluc and later Gressoney just visible thousands of metres beneath us. From the pure-white summit of the Castor we made our first proper turns, steep and committing but as soft as in midwinter.

In the afternoon, though, the wind got up and the weather got worse. At 4pm we were in a whiteout, fresh snow blowing around us, and Dan using GPS to navigate through the storm to find the Rifugio Gnifetti. Bizarre that it was only a fortnight before midsummer, but by now I had given up thinking about the real world down below.

A refuge has stood on this spot, 3,600 metres up on a rocky crest, since 1876; the current structure, built almost entirely of weathered wooden planks, dates from 1967. We clambered up metal rungs hammered into the rock to reach it, then gratefully fell through the door. Inside, the uneven floor and my lack of acclimatisation meant I couldn’t shake the sense that we were in a moving ship but, this being just over the border into Italy, it was nothing if not civilised. Bottles of red wine lined the walls behind the bar, a blackboard offered platters of cured meats and cheese, and Aperol spritz for €8 (already woozy, I stuck to water). Later there was a lengthy, four-course meal, served at a convivial table we shared with mountaineers from Chile and France, then a very short night.

We woke at 3.30am, set off an hour later and climbed to the Zumsteinspitze, at about 4,500m. We considered what would have been the descent of a lifetime, down into Italy’s Anzasca valley, but ruled it out because the previous day’s wind and fresh snow made it too risky. Instead we took a long, mellow run back towards Zermatt down the Grenzgletscher — slaloming between ice cliffs and crevasses for 9 kilometres, alone in a brilliant white world and with the Matterhorn poking up in front of us.

When the snow became too soft, we clambered over the moraine and up to the rack-and-pinion railway at Rotenboden. For the whole descent the only movement we’d seen had been the flow of blue, meltwater rivulets on the lower part of the glacier, and the scurry of a lone marmot, but cresting the ridge now we found dozens of tourists posing for selfies on the rocks around the station. We joined them on the train down into Zermatt, the summer air thick and soupy, but Dan pointed to clouds building on the horizon — “the next front coming in”. The ski season might have another few weeks yet.

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