Chandolin -> Zinal
3rd June 2008
Meeting up with David, a regular ski partner in the winter, and all sorts of plans had come and gone for this week, climbing the Zinalrothorn or La Besso, climbing some other peak but in the end for today the weather had the final call and after some heavy rain and snow at altitude a hike looked the best idea. The route was a classic of the area, from Chandolin passing the lift system at Saint Luc and then on and up to the Bella Vouarda with an idea to take in the Forcletta before starting a traverse back to Zinal.
Visibility was poor at times, just passing the observatory I sent an SMS to Julie saying we’d be on the webcam but of course it wasn’t possible to see much in the mist. We walked a way along the route they have Saint Luc for star gazers, along with the observatory there’s a walk with models of planets. I’m not really sure what the one above is though.
The “normal” route passes the Hotel Weisshorn but we’d decided to head to Bella Vouarda to add a little interest, until we got to the track we’d not really committed to the route as we’d wanted to see how much snow was still on the ground, it’s pretty early in the season to be up above 2500m and there’s still some snow around. It looked OK so we started to head up. Some of the streams were a bit swollen though, above right you can see one of the bridges is submerged.
Higher up we cross the snow line and it gets a bit interesting, it’s néve which has melted and frozen again a few times. It’s varying between something fairly firm and in other places we’re sinking to our knees or deeper. The plan is to make the col from where we think the snow is going to be a lot easier, the idea is that we’re on a north facing slope and it’s still holding snow, after the col we’re going to descend on a southerly aspect and the snow should be melted and a lot thinner. The slopes themselves though are stable and there’s no risk of a slide here.
After the col we drop to Alpage Nava and meet this rather fantastic dog, he’s not such a good guard dog though, he was asleep as we walked up and took a few minutes to wake up and notice us. I’m not sure the photo’ does him justice, he was really large with massive paws and looked pretty young so maybe not even full size.
The traverse is pretty good, there’s great views down the valley and it’s a fantastic line. Along the way we see some really extreme damage from avalanches, trees torn up and uprooted, rock slides and vegetation stripped, a few weeks ago this would have been a bad place to be. The rain forecast finally arrived so we had to take a pause to put on waterproofs but it didn’t last and we were soon stowing them away.
All in all, a great route, our variant over the col adds some time particular in the deep snow we had today but it’s worthwhile I think.
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