Shhh! The stags are singing.” With one hand, hiking guide Anita Stadelmann exhorts me to be silent. With the other, she points towards a nearby stand of pine forest, which suddenly emits a foghorn blast so honkingly loud that it makes my heart skip a beat and sends a flock of birds scattering from the trees. “Rutting season’s just begun,” says Anita, with an apologetic smile.
It’s a boom so lusty and low that a primal echo of fear reverberates somewhere deep in my psyche, as if the sound might summon an avalanche, smothering me in an eternal quilt of snow. But I needn’t worry – there is no snow. The mountains of the Valais stand naked, stripped of their white winter coats by the warmth of summer.
They look improbably huge, distorting all sense of scale, so that from a distance they appear painted flat against the firmament, towns looking like little spatters of white dots at their feet. In the distance, sunlight bathes the balding peak of Bec de la Montau, lightly dusted with the very last of the snow. Trout burble in the River Printse, while a song rises from the surrounding hills – the tinkling of bells, strung on the necks of the cows who graze on the alpage, the high mountain pasture, at this time of year.
Deep snow and après-ski – that’s what the Swiss Alps mean to many people. A place of winter. But in other seasons the Valais reveals its true face, introducing a vibrant cast of characters and swapping its winter shroud for a coat of many colours.
“The mountains of the Valais stand naked, stripped of their white winter coats by the warmth of summer.”
I had met Anita this morning as the pale alpine sunlight fell over Nendaz, a beautiful but down-to-earth village of a few hundred wooden chalets and stadels (grain stores) in the heart of the 4 Vallées region. We had set off on a hike through the hills, following the zig-zag grooves of the bisses – historic water channels carved into the mountainsides to irrigate the pastures – climbing higher as it began to warm.
The hills burst with life. Nutcracker birds rustle in a pine tree. “They’re busy this time of year,” Anita says, explaining that they’re collecting pine nuts that they bury under the ground, returning to the same spot in winter, like a squirrel with his acorns, to collect them from beneath their blanket of snow.
We come across a half-finished meal, with pinecones neatly laid out on a flat slab of rock. Anita picks up an untouched cone and prises it apart; we snack on the raw nuts, which are mild and earthy.
Foraging is something of a speciality for Anita, it turns out. At various points on the walk, we stop to feast on blueberries and juniper berries, the latter bursting from knee-high bushes by the paths like black grapes overflowing on the vine. We periodically have to waft the air in front of our faces, our vision obscured by a galaxy of seedheads carried on the breeze, dancing like gnats in the sunlight.
A flurry of movement catches my eye on the hill to my right – the stout backside of a marmot, wriggling into its burrow. “There’s more,” says Anita, and we soon count a whole family of these charming, rotund rodents, playing on the hillside and bathing their potbellies in the midday sun.
Some of the wildlife here, though, carries more threat. “The wolves are back here now,” says Anita. “They came over the mountains from France and Italy about five years ago. The farmers aren’t very happy, but that’s life – that’s nature.” Her statement is typical of the people of the Valais: proud and respectful of the region’s rich wildlife, but unsentimental.
After an hour or so’s lung-busting ascent, tracing the path of the bisse, we turn a corner to be dazzled by the thing we’ve come to find: the blue-green expanse of the Lac de Cleuson, glittering like a jewel in a cirque surrounded by steep mountainsides.
Despite the name, this is a reservoir rather than a natural lake, created by a hydroelectric dam in 1950. The water looks like paint; a thick, almost matte turquoise, caused by the interaction of the summer sunlight with the mineral silt that permeates the water.
We skirt the side of the reservoir and walk along the dam wall, the Printse Valley plunging precipitously to our right. At the end of the path stands a tiny chapel, simple and white and unadorned, gazing out over the yawning valley. “The chapel of Saint-Barthélémy,” says Anita. “Once a year, farmers gather here from the alpage for a special prayer: the Blessing of the Cheese.” My kind of pilgrimage.
As the afternoon begins to glow into evening, Anita stops us in a forest clearing, hoists her rucksack onto a tree stump and hauls out a majestic wheel of cheese, a foot in diameter and covered in a hard rind.
This, of course, is Raclette, the alpine cheese that is the pride of Valais cuisine. The Valais is the home of Raclette, in fact – its full name is Raclette du Valais AOP, meaning it can only be produced in the canton, and must be done so in the traditional way, using unpasteurised milk. The first mention of the people here melting semi-hard alpine cow’s cheese over an open fire dates as far back as 1574.
Now, Anita takes part in that age-old tradition, building a fire from pebbles and dry twigs and melting the cheese over it on a tin-foil platform. Even in summer, the evenings get chilly here in the mountains, and the gooey cheese, smothered on crusty white bread and served with white Valaisian wine, is the perfect comfort blanket.
The next morning, my time in Nendaz is at an end, and I set out east across the Valais, making use of the canton’s superb public-transport system. First up, it’s a bus, winding around hairpin mountain bends on the half-hour journey to Sion, the capital of the Valais, which sits below me in a deep valley.
It’s sunny again – as it is, on average, for 300 days a year here – and the light bathes the valley in a soft glow, the suburbs of Sion giving way to the vineyards that hug the hills of the Rhône Valley, comprising Switzerland’s biggest wine region.
My bus terminates at Sion, so I take advantage of the opportunity to explore this modest medieval town of 35,000 people – a bustling metropolis by the somnolent standards of the Valais – and to learn more about the region’s rich winemaking tradition. In the low-rise medieval Old Town, I stop at 1950 Rive Gauche for lunch with David Héritier, director of the region’s premier winery, Les Celliers de Sion.
After exquisite plates of wild Valais boar, David introduces me to some of the region’s best wines. We try Fendant, a dry, citrussy white commonly paired with Raclette, and Petite Arvine, another white, made from an indigenous Valais grape, whose aromatic fruit flavours – grapefruit, rhubarb and honey – pair beautifully with seafood.
“Swiss wine is fresh wine,” says David. “Generally, they’re not so strong in alcohol content, and the different wines have a huge diversity of aromas which pair with lots of different cuisines. We have 250 different grapes in Switzerland – that’s a huge diversity for a small country.” Of these 250, a rather astonishing 55 grape varieties are cultivated in Valais alone (31 of which are white, and 24 red). Unsurprisingly, the Swiss are keen to keep their wine to themselves; only 1% of Swiss wine is exported, although that figure is rising.
We jump into David’s car and make the short drive to Celliers de Sion’s visitor centre, a striking, angular building with a façade like mirrored honeycomb, reflecting the terraces of vineyards staggered up the opposite hillsides. It’s not yet harvest season – that comes in September – and the vines hang heavy with grapes.
“This is the only place in Switzerland where you can do this – walk along the bisse that irrigates the vineyard,” says David. There are also three gîtes here where visitors can stay, and a summer-long programme of wine activities, from vineyard bike tours to tastings among the vines.
David drops me back at Sion railway station and I cross over to the platform, browsing my phone while I wait for my train. “Swiss Trains May Ruin Your Day!” warns an Instagram post from About Switzerland, an account run by the country’s Department of Foreign Affairs. They give the following reasons behind this cautionary message: perfect punctuality; ridiculous comfort; and distracting alpine views. “The views are so beautiful it is impossible to relax or close your eyes for a nap,” it reads, revelling in false modesty.
As I take my huge, plush seat and the train glides out of the platform and into the sun-drenched Swiss Alps, though, I’m hard pressed to disagree. Travel usually helps to subvert the stereotypes we carry in our minds, but in this case, a cliché is being consolidated. Swiss trains really are a joy: spotlessly clean, extremely comfortable and as punctual as you would expect from a nation of horologists.
Riding the rails also brings home the cultural and linguistic variety that Switzerland packs into its small land area. After we’ve been travelling for an hour or so, the train announcements – formerly Francophone – suddenly start speaking German as they herald our approach to the city of Visp. From here, it’s another 45 minutes to Fiesch, an impossibly picturesque village of wooden houses and a black-roofed church, huddled around a tributary of the Rhône.
Fiesch is beautiful in itself, but is most famous as a gateway to Valais’ only UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Jungfrau-Aletsch Protected Area. I drop my bags at my hotel and meet my guide for today, Patrizio Perino Fontana, who is going to take me to the Aletsch Glacier – a frozen domain that even the warm days of the Valaisian summer cannot melt.
Our first stop, ten minutes’ drive from Fiesch, is the Goms Bridge, a mightily impressive suspension bridge, 920ft long, which hangs 300ft above the rushing water of the Rhône and the towering pine trees that grow on its banks, looking Lilliputian far below our feet. “The river runs all the way to Marseille,” says Patrizio, an amiable man in his late 20s, as the bridge wobbles with our footsteps, “but it’s still glacier-blue up here.” He’s right – the water has the cold, teal thickness of an iceberg.
At the end of the bridge is a gondola station, where we board a waiting carriage and begin to journey upwards. Below us, moraines ripple the green surface of the valley floor like crumpled felt. Mountains rear up on either side, this time high enough to still be frosted with snow at the height of summer.
We pass through a scattered band of cloud, after which the little towns below seem disconnected, like islands in the sky. We spot a chamois clinging to a ledge of rock, grazing on the summer grass.
I close my eyes and I can hear the glacier: water flowing both underneath and on top of it, the ice creaking and groaning like a living thing. The Aletsch Glacier has shrunk significantly in the last century, and as it melts it throws up the remains of the things it has swallowed over the millennia: human skeletons, rocks, the fuselages of planes.
We disembark the gondola and find ourselves at the highest viewpoint over the mighty Aletsch Glacier, a great freeway of ice 12 miles long and over a mile wide – the largest glacier in the Alps. It weighs ten billion tonnes; the ice is half-a-mile thick at its largest point.
“I close my eyes and I can hear the glacier”
This mercurial landscape remains open to exploration for now, though, with glacier hikes an option only in the summer months. I squint down to the surface of the ice and see a group of hikers, tiny as ants, making the most of the warm summer that lays the landscapes of the Valais open to exploration for a few months only – even up here, in this eternal kingdom of ice.
Need to know: Valais, Switzerland
Getting there: The nearest major international airport is in Geneva, from where trains connect to Valais hubs such as Sion as well as many smaller towns.
Getting around: Hiring a car in Geneva or Sion gives you the most flexibility, but the Valais’ excellent public transport links means that most towns and villages are accessible by train or bus.
Best time to go: Many of the activities available in Valais in the summer, such as hikes on the Aletsch Glacier, are available between June and October.
Where to eat: Don’t miss Restaurant des Alpes (des-alpes.ch) in Fiesch for Valais specialities such as raclette and cholera, a rustic pie. In Sion, try Café des Châteaux (cafedeschateaux.ch) for classics like beef carbonnade and pork schnitzel.
Where to stay: In Haute-Nendaz, the lovely MAD Retreat (madretreat.ch) has gorgeous pine-wood cabins clustered along a forested mountainside. It offers a thoroughly modern alpine lodge experience in this quiet resort. In an elegant lemon-hued townhouse in the photogenic town of Fiesch, Hotel Des Alpes (des-alpes.ch) combines contemporary boutique style and comfort with a fantastic restaurant serving hearty country cuisine, plus the significant bonus of an on-site microbrewery, producing a range of artisanal craft beers.
Further information: valais.ch / aletscharena.ch / nendaz.ch
