Winter wanderings
Brenda Clough • April 10, 2020
Above the Kesch Hut, Albula Alps, Switzerland
Do you ever wonder what summer walking guides do in the winter?
Well each one is probably different but generally we are all outdoorsy types so we do something outdoors. In our case we pack up the car, catch a ferry and head to the Alps for our winter passion which is ski touring.
This year we were very lucky, heading off in mid-February and managing to get back home in mid-March just before the world closed down. We had a couple of narrow escapes with borders closing but managed to complete our holiday without any problems.
Ski touring isn’t cross-country skiing or downhill skiing. It is basically skiing on downhill skis but with a binding on them which allows you to glide uphill as well by putting mohair skins on the base of the skis. Why would you want to go uphill on skis when you can use a ski lift? Well because it allows you to go to places that you could not get to otherwise, access beautiful mountain scenery and stay in alpine refuges or remote hotels.
Our first week was more of the downhill variety but included quite a lot of off-piste skiing with a company called Snoworks in the pretty Italian valley of Gressoney north of the Aosta valley. The highlights of the week were a couple of off-piste trips to a vegetarian refuge for lunch (the Orestes Hut) and on the final day a descent down an excellent gully from Bettaforca.
Our second week was at a Berghotel in Switzerland. In Switzerland you often find small hotels which are reachable by road in the summer but only by ski or snowcat in the winter. We stayed in the lovely Berghotel Alpenroesli for five nights which is in the Ratikon mountains in the north east of Switzerland, close to the Austrian border. It is a beautiful area, hardly ever visited by the British in the winter and only occasionally in the summer. Although we did not have the best of weather and this limited our skiing trips we will be back as the hotel and local area are stunning.
Our final week was the most adventurous and most surreal as on the few occasions when we managed to get a mobile signal we kept hearing news of borders closing, lockdowns in Italy and cancelled skiing trips all due to the Coronavirus. We started on the pistes in St Moritz on a cold and windy day (very Scottish) and after several lifts headed over the final col into what seemed like the unknown – heading down a valley then turning almost 180 degrees to head back up another valley and finally reaching our refuge at 7.30pm at night in the moonlight! Thankfully the guardian still had dinner waiting for us. The next day our guide, Olly, led us back to civilization and a taxi and a UNESCO heritage train journey took us to the pretty village of Bergun. A couple of beautiful days followed, in hot sunshine, from Bergun to the superbly situated Kesch hut in the mountains below glaciers where we stayed for two nights. The next two days were the complete opposite, skiing in the ‘white room’ with virtually no visibility before we finally escaped to a snow covered road giving us an easy descent back to civilisation.
We are now home, local walks from our door, and once again we are really lucky to have such beautiful scenery literally or our doorstep. Just waiting till the restrictions lift so we can show it to you again.
Skinning above the Berghotel Alpenroesli, Ratikon, Switzerland
Enjoying the Bettaforca, Gressoney, Italy
Richard & Brenda on the summit of Tour de Moyen in Switzerland As we wind down Perthshire Treks over the coming winter, we have had time to look back over the last 6 years and all the lovely people we have walked with and the great adventures we have had. One of our very first adventures was for a lovely group of women from the Netherlands organised through Schottland op Maat . They came to Pitlochry on one of the wettest weekends of the year! Plans were quickly changed from the proposed walk up Schiehallion to a walk along the Rob Roy Way followed by a walk around Pitlochry the following day – and they were amazed at the waterfalls – they don’t have many in the Netherlands! The same year saw Richard do his fastest ascent ever of Ben Vrackie with a young Russian couple who were into marathon running and we also provided some self-guided walking for a corporate group from Baillie Gifford . This first year, as it turned out, was fairly typical with some clients booking directly with us and others via travel agents or travel curators.
What’s it like to be a walking guide? Well, this year will be my 10th and final year as a walking guide, so this blog post looks back at my longer than expected second career.
If you're living or staying in Pitlochry or Aberfeldy, you can use a local bus to help you do a wonderful walk between the two towns. Find out more in our latest blog.
As I write this blog, a cold northerly wind has set in across the UK. A change in the wind direction so that it is coming from the Arctic is one of those weather patterns that is very noticeable for many reasons. Find out more in this blog post.
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