About mountain huts

Last summer I stayed in four different mountain huts in three countries, which gave me an opportunity to start writing the chapter on huts promised some time ago in the post About mountains. I never quite finished it, but have been spurred on to do so now by having just stayed in the Hospice du Grand Saint Bernard about which I shall write soon in my next post.

The word “hut” comes from the German speaking Alpine countries where these buildings are called a “Hütte” but they are usually much bigger and more robust than the English “hut” would suggest. In the Romance language countries they are called a refuge (“refuge”, “rifugio”) which I think is a more elegant expression conveying their purpose of providing the mountaineer with a safe haven in a storm and let’s face it the mountains can quickly become a very hostile environment so somewhere warm, dry and cozy where you can shelter and spend the night is a great boon, even essential.

Kugy, the great Austro-Hungarian discoverer of the Julian Alps wrote that you only really get to know a mountain when you have slept on it. He generally used to bivouac himself as he was exploring at a time when huts had not yet been built where he went, but his phrase still holds good for the less intrepid like me who prefer to sleep indoors at altitude, if only because it means carrying a hell of a lot less stuff with you up the hill (sleeping bag, mat, possibly tent, food, cooker etc).

You can still appreciate the silence and isolation before turning in and wake up to find yourself in an amazingly unspoilt location.

Mountain huts as we know them started appearing in the late 19th and early 20th C when gentleman and lady climbers first hit on the notion that Alpine walking and climbing were a fine way of enjoying nature, a thought which had never really occured before to the god-fearing locals who saw the mountains instead as a potentially rather dangerous place which one had to put up with when looking after grazing sheep and cows or out hunting chamois and the like.

The main purpose of staying in an Alpine hut is to enable you to make an early start already at altitude on a route which may be very long to complete or is likely to become dangerous later in the day because of deteriorating snow and ice conditions as things warm up or because of the risk of an afternoon storm. However, linking together several different huts can become a pleasant itinerary in itself, obviating the need to make a long descent back into the valley once having painstakingly gained altitude.

Alex, my long-standing mountaineering companion and myself find ourselves subtly moving with age from the first into the second category of hut visitors.

This July we hauled ourselves up to the Oberaletschhütte at 2640m, perched above the glacier of the same name. The approach used to be over the glacier itself but as it has receeded leaving a dirty mess of rocks and rushing torrents among the occasional snow and ice, a new path was constructed a few years ago clinging to the moutainside above it and rejoicing in the name of Panoramaweg. It was indeed a spectacular walk but with our heavy bags we were well and truly knackered by the time we got to the hut and we were also too late to bag one of the more comfortable lower bunks.

Before dinner we took the time to gather information on possible routes for the next day with the hut keeper and a group of young English climbers. The routes looked and sounded iffier than we had expected. The glacier itself did not offer an immediate enticing stroll over snow but a slow progress over stones and boulders littering it for several kilometres. Even to get down onto it we would have to descend a cliff using a long metal ladder. The alternative was an unmarked scramble up a ridge with a long scree downhill back to the hut path, always assuming you found the right way down.

That evening the hut had organized a folk music evening featuring four accordeonists and a double bassist, whose instrument had been helicoptered in. Music, merriment, dancing and later yodelling proceeded into the small hours of the morning, accompanied by plenty of beer and impenetrable Swiss German dialect.

When we surfaced, bleary-eyed the next morning we looked at each other and had to admit we had slept badly, felt dictinctly unfit and didn’t fancy our chances on either itinerary A or B. So we decided to go back down the same way to a rather attractive looking small hotel we has passed on the way up, from where we could do an easy summit, the Sparhorn, the next day. And off we tottered at a leisurely pace admiring the view over the glacier and later across to the distant Matterhorn.

In so doing we had made the hut itself our final destination and it had indeed been fun to spend the night up there with the local entertainment. We resolved that our next outing would seek to do no more than to walk lightweight up to a hut and return to the valley by a different route.

Thus in September we had a weekend away to visit the Cabane de Valsorey, this time a hut in French speaking Switzerland. You can use this hut to climb the Grand Combin, but on a wet weekend late in the season nobody there was going to go any further the next day. The Cabane stands in a fairly desolate location at 3037m overlooking the Valsorey glacier. That represents quite a long walk up from Bourg St Pierre at 1640m where we left the car. We made it in good time just before it started to rain and after eating our picnic we retired for an almighty siesta in the single large dormitory above the main room and kitchen downstairs. Valsorey is quite small and is run by two women. There were nine of us staying that night, all the others were Swiss, though one young couple had decided they wanted to live somewhere exotic... Burnley, Lancashire.

As the rain beat down outside it was good to be warm and dry indoors, reading what books we could find or looking out of the window at the changing view as the clouds crept down and then lifted again.

The next day we were all walking the same route at our different paces, it was another newly constructed panoramic path, though views were limited because of the cloud cover. We kept seeing the younger group we had chatted to the previous evening as we overtook each other pausing in different places. Huts are a great place to establish mountaineering cameraderie.

The best hut I stayed in last summer was in the Carnic Alps in Friuli, Italy. Clara and I returned from the pleasant cool of Edinburgh to the unspeakable sweltering muggy August heat of Monfalcone which plunged me into a vile mood. That evening I had an altercation with a cantankerous old woman who complained I was standing in her way on the cycle track part of the pavement: I told her to go and die. Clara found this a bit strong and told me I had better take myself off to the cool of the mountains to calm down.

So the next morning I was on the 7 am bus bound for Tolmezzo and beyond.

My objective was to climb the highest peak in the Carnic Alps, Coglians 2788 m. The bus would only get me to 800m leaving a rather long walk in to the starting hut Marinelli at 2120m. It turned out to be totally off the beaten track, as most hikers come up by shorter routes. I met only two people on that long way up. Mid-week the place was fairly quiet, there were only fifteen of us staying over. Once arrived and having dumped my rucksack in my rather comfortable room I sat outside on the terrace with an Apfelschorle and asked to borrow the guitar for a strum. I fell into conversation with Ugo, a now retired local pastry cook and former mountain rescue man who was a regular visitor to the hut and had known its present warden Caterina since she was a little girl, daughter of the previous warden. He was a guitarist himself and also very interested in English literature. I got him to point out all the peaks we could see in the vast panorama from the terrace.

At dinner I was at Ugo’s table with a talkative Roman whose family was originally from Friuli and his much younger girlfriend who he wanted to show the region to. The food was excellent, pasta of course to start with and then salsiccia, polenta and wild mushrooms all with copious regional red wine, followed by Apfelstrudel (you can work up quite an appetite doing a 1300m ascent). At another table was a group of local men in their sixties maybe even seventies, talking Friulano, which qualifies as a language as it is just one dialect too far away to still be recognizable as Italian. In fact the evning became something of a crash course in Friulano because some jokes Ugo had told us in Italian he later retold in Friulano to the old guys.

After the food they got going in a capella Friulano folk songs. It was quite wonderful. I contributed to the musical evening by doing a few standards on the guitar and continued with the staff who now appeared after the washing up was over and a round of liqueur was offered on the house. Finally we went outside to look at the stars and after a while Caterina asked me to play something. “Caruso” seemed appropriate (as I write this I note that Dalla sadly passed away last week).

The next morning I said a fond goodbye and set off up Coglians. It turned out to be quite a slog as parts were very steep and sometimes over quite loose ground. At the top I met the party of six old Friulani who had got there before me.

I came back down to stay on the Austrian side at the Wolayerseehütte. It was a pleasant enough hut but the experience was quite different. This one lies on a popular route walked by German speakers on the other side of the border. They purposefully walk from one hut to the next moving Eastwards along the chain. So it was very full and businesslike, none of the small local and family atmosphere of Marinelli and the feeling that local regulars had come up simply becuse it was a great place to spend an evening. The food inevitably was nowhere near as good as in Italy.

The next day I walked a section of the Carnic high route westwards having left the crowd at the hut gathering to move on east. I met no one for three hours. It’s quite easy to find that real mountain solitude if you don’t follow the herd.

I guess that over the years I must have stayed in about fifty different Alpine huts in France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia. The variety is immense. The French, at least those of the Club Alpin Français seem to go in for the “harder than thou approach”: the experience is not genuine if you’re not roughing it. The worst one I’ve stayed in is the Refuge des Ecrins at 3175m: a bare main room, uncomfortable dormitories, bad food on plastic plates and an abominable outdoor squat toilet where your doings drop straight off a cliff. At the same altitude in the Südtirol you can stay in the Becherhaus 3195m with a wood panelled and nicely decorated cozy Stube rather like in some moutain farmer’s home, eat good food, and sleep in nice little bedrooms for four. Staying in a hut doesn’t have to be an unpleasant experience. In fact at the Becher there was a group of jolly young locals who had come up all the way just for a good walk and the laugh of having an evening and night up there in a group of friends.

There is something quite magical about a mountain hut that gets it right and offers you a comfortable homely experience of a small group of people who have all made a big effort to be in a special place where they are safely protected from the harsh night outside.