We had read great things about the Hotel Weisshorn (our Haute Route book calls it one of the highlights of the Haute Route)—so we decided to make that our destination. Today is what I would call the fun trail day—on the way to St. Luc, there are these little activity stations that you’re supposed to interact with (for children probably, and we didn’t quite understand them but it was nice to have them there anyway!). And then, after the funicular from St. Luc, it’s a 6 km planetary walk, where there are beautiful sculptures of the planets laid out in a proportional way that demonstrates that the universe is very very large and Earth is very very small.

We were sad to say goodbye to our little paradise of a place in Grimentz, a town so burdened by geraniums….but that’s what happens when you’re trying to do a long distance hike, you move on. There really wouldn’t be any places to buy lunch food for the next three days, so we stocked up before leaving Grimentz on some bread and cheese and snacks as well.

We had trouble finding our way out of Grimentz: our hiking book made it sound simple to find St. Luc, as did the local maps, but we had difficulty finding the right signs leading us to the right paths (trouble means it just took us about 20 or 30 extra minutes, and us charging through someone’s backyard to get to a lower road, not a huge deal). Ask for directions before you start out! You could also just take a bus to St. Luc, but we wanted to have a slightly longer hiker today.

As I mentioned, these were just hikes of pleasure and fun. The first portion to Vissoie had no one else was on the trail, and there odd games every so often to our left (one instructed you, we think, to feel the hooves of dead animals (!) in the display, so you can figure out what sort of tracks they make). On occasion we could spot the Hotel Weisshorn (our destination), this white box perched at the top of a rise of a mountain. We were in the woods, which I love (less cows here for grazing, I suppose, than the Bernese Oberland, so they don’t need as many grazing fields). Vissoie made a terrific lunch spot by an old medieval tower—that said, Vissoie seems much busier than Grimentz, and we were glad that we stayed in Grimentz for our 2 night rest.

The hike up to St. Luc was, well, a grunt of a climb. The views weren’t terrific, the woods had disappeared so we had the hot sun, it was pretty darn steep, there seemed to be a plague of grasshoppers overtaking the trail, there was no coverage to find a modest place to go to the bathroom….450 meters up that seemed to take forever. Though the grasshoppers were rather cool—the undersides of their wings were red, so when we approached them and they jumped, they turned into red moths for several seconds in the air. We emerged into St. Luc with much joy: a cute town, where everything was closed because it was between noon-2 p.m., but Harold and I hastily searched for a bathroom, and I managed to find some nice restaurant owners who let me use their toilet.

At this point, I really needed some ice cream (my body was a little off today, not sure why—perhaps because we had an easy day the day before)—but all the shops were closed, and the funicular, we found out, was leaving in about 2 minutes (it left every hour, on the half hour). So we huffed our way over to the station, had a lovely lift up (you could hike up, but why, I would ask?), and at the top…we managed to find the best ice cream in all of Switzerland, served up with incredible views. The upper funicular station (Tignousa) had a cafeteria packed with older people. I think tour buses pull up to St. Luc, tour groups take the funicular up, and then everyone eats lunch up there. People were friendly and noisy and happy.

We started the planetary walk by wandering up to an observatory and sticking our heads inside. A man inside there, maybe a scientist we don’t know, asked us something in French, and we hurried away, thinking maybe he needed some quiet to do his science. The walk was relatively flat, circling above St. Luc, leading to the Hotel Weisshorn. That said, everything today seemed to be taking forever, so this hike, even in its flatness, was challenging. I did nap on a bench near Jupiter, which helped a little to keep my energy up.

And then…the Hotel Weisshorn. The trail got especially pretty as we approached the hotel. The ground cover was heath-like, lots of low lying brush, some trickling streams, wild blueberries. It was a big old hotel in the middle of nowhere, full of character, old class, and attitude. The employees weren’t the least bit friendly to us. They seemed disappointed we didn’t speak French, and often they would speak to us quickly in French, with a lot of hand gestures, and then wander away. Sometimes the one person there who did speak English would wander out to help us, though she also seemed to think it funny we didn’t speak French (but we were in Switzerland! We would have done better if they spoke German). The interior seemed like a crooked castle—stone floors, walls are slightly slanted, murals painted on the walls to make them look like stone blocks. Our room looked out on the valley and the view was most stunning at night, I think, when it felt like we were in an airplane looking down. We could see all the little lights of the towns, and even a man carrying a bobbing light through the woods.

Dinner was an oddly formal four course meal that took two hours (though none of the hikers were dressed formally). The women who had checked us in were now wearing fancy black dresses. Pick a seat near the window if you’re eating dinner here, so you can watch the sun vanish in the valley. There weren’t menus, everyone eats on halb pension here. The vegetarian meal was noodles and cheese, which was all right—the views through the huge picture windows of the dining room were worth it, even if I was still hungry after the meal. After dinner, Harold and I rushed outside into the chilly air to see a good deal of stars.

The walls, like a few of the other Berghauses, were very thin. This was the place Harold christened our adventure “a series of beautiful hot hikes where your body falls apart.” We were tired and sore and a little hungry, but all I had to do was look out the window, at the view, and everything was worth it. We heard our neighbors giggling and chatting a little too late in the night, as we would be getting up earlier for a long hard hike the next day.