Bella Vouarda, Saint-Luc
30th December 2008
I’ve skied up in this area as a ski tour but found the descent slightly disappointing so as it’s great high mountain scenery I thought it would make a perfect snow shoe trip. The route starts off from Saint-Luc and to save some time we rode the funicular up to Tignousa (2178m) and walked in along the sentier planétaire. The sentier planétaire is a route from the funicular to around the Hotel Weishorn, along the way are scale models of the planets of the solar system at scale distances from each other, it’s quite interesting and really brings home the relative distances between the planets.
The Bella Vouarda is a pass between the Forcletta and the Pointes de Nava which form a ridge running down to the Hotel Weisshorn, I’ve also been over here in the spring as an extended version of the classic traverse from Saint-Luc to Zinal.
As a snow shoe route this was pretty long, over 17km and nearly 1000m of ascent and probably not the easy stroll people generally associate with snow shoeing.
Mostly it’s been ski tourers up here so far and on snow shoes it made sense to take a slightly different line picking some of the firmer snow to keep the effort of breaking trail to a minimum.
The great thing with this route is that it’s high enough to be above the tree line and once you’ve left the main track to the Hotel Weishorn behind you’re in a fairly remote high alpine area.
From the Bella Vouarda we took a ridge line and traversed in to the Lac du Toûno before turning to descend via Le Chiesso and picking up one of the marked snow shoe trails back into Saint-Luc.
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