WHR day 9: Gruben to St Niklaus

We thought today was going to be another hard day given the height gain but it wasn’t too bad.

We had 1100 metres straight up from the hotel. We must be getting fitter because we maintained a steady pace, catching a couple of groups on organised hikes, reaching the Augstbordpass col at just below 2900 metres after only 2 hours and 25 minutes.

The scenery was beautiful throughout the climb, changing from woods, to green meadows, to rocks, with sections of boulders to cross, and loose scree for the last section to the top.

We had a snack just below the col, sheltering from the wind, before setting off on what we thought would be a straight forward but long descent.

It started off like that, with the terrain the reverse of what we’d seen on the way up, changing from scree to green meadows. However, after about an hour we reached a huge boulder field which we needed to traverse.

This slowed our progress considerably, especially crossing the sections where there had been recent rock falls and the path had been blocked. This was a little scary in places if we stopped to think about it… a worry in case more rock fell!

Once we had negotiated the boulder field, we had a narrow balcony path with big drop offs to the left, before reaching the head of the valley where it reaches the Mattertal leading to Zermatt.

The view from here was spectacular, overlooking the Ried Glacier and several peaks including the Dom (4545 metres), so we stopped to have lunch. Afterwards, the path wound its way downhill, for the last 500m of descent.

We had already decided we were going to take the cable car from Jungen down to St Niklaus and save ourselves the extra 800m of downhill. This was definitely the right decision. The cable only took 4 people, and only ran every 30 minutes. We encouraged Dan and Becky, who we were with at this point, to take the lift that was about to go down, and we waited for the next one. Two people joined us, and it was a bit of a squash with our huge packs! It was also a little scary because the descent was so long and slow, and we seemed to be hanging in mid air, high above the valley floor, for ages!

We survived 😜 and, at the bottom, joined Dan and Becky for a couple of beers before heading to our hotel. We have a lovely corner room with a balcony again to relax before our last steep ascent tomorrow.