My Walker’s Haute — 136K in the Swiss Alps

Lauri Elias
7 min readJul 11, 2024

Since we did TMB 3 years prior, we skipped the Chamonix-Champex part and therefore France.

Day 1: Sembrancher — Le Châble

Warm-up. We take trains from Geneva to Sembrancher. Getting on a train without a ticket is techically fineable, though nice Swiss conductors will forgive foreigners for the 1st, 2nd, and 9th time. Unless you have a special 190-franc card, you can’t get half fare. It’s the default in the app.

Garmin Connect screenshot of our first day of hiking — 6.6 kilometers
8,200 steps

We stay in Le Giétroz, a very affordable option, same as Pizzeria de la place nearby. 21,300 steps for the day, mostly chasing public transport.

Day 2: Le Châble — Cabane Mont Fort

As foretold by the scrolls of Google Sheets, we’re in for a hefty 1700 meters of ascent this day:

3 merged screenshots of Garmin Connect, showing about 15K of hiking with 1700 meters of ascent

Quite a bit for variance: forest, meadows, rocky terrain above the treeline. We start meeting marmots. Heartily recommend getting a cold one halfway at Ice Cube.

A bench aside a road leading up to Cabane Mont Fort with ‘88’ written on the back
Complete with a һеіⅼ-һіⅼτег bench

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Lauri Elias
Lauri Elias

Written by Lauri Elias

Not famous enough for a Substack

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