Why autumn is the time to visit Switzerland

Moonlight silvers the fields, the mountains are masses of dark and there are few evening travellers boarding the cableway at Mörel. It rises from the valley floor to the village of Riederalp, nearly 1,200 metres above, the locals floating home in unlit gondolas. We glide through the autumn night up cliffs of shadows and silence. I am expecting marvels — I have come to walk in the soaring autumnal colours and to see a glacier — but this cable car strung between pines and stars is absurdly bewitching.   

“Does everyone who grows up here have a passionate moment on that ride?” I ask my hotel’s proprietor.

He laughs off the question. “The problem we have at the moment is the euro exchange rate. It’s very quiet.”

Even without the effects of the strong franc, autumn is the off-season here in the canton of Valais, after the summer visitors have returned to work and before the skiers flood in. For many Swiss, though, autumn is the Alps’ most magical moment, when the larch trees — Europe’s only deciduous conifers — turn golden, the sun shines and the mountain tops are dusted by the first snows.

Come September and October this disparate country unites in delighted, near-obsessive celebration of the season, planning expeditions to walk among the woods and tracking the turning of the leaves via an online “foliage map” that offers forecasts, live updates and links to scores of webcams.

The Romantics found that nature here transcends all expectation. “The mighty Alps, belonging to another earth, the habitations of another race of beings,” Mary Shelley wrote. She was right. And another race of beings are still here: visiting the Aletsch glacier is like travelling to meet a myth, a time-lapse serpent of snow and rock 14 miles long, half a mile thick, slithering out of the Ice Age.

In the morning I cable-car up from Riederalp to 2,300 metres to look down on where the glacier, the Alps’ largest, lies coiled around the peaks. The few other walkers are mostly Swiss and quiet, perhaps hushed by the view.

On the Moosfluh ridge we stand in an absolute light, bright as heaven’s morning. The Alps are still as sunbathers, factor 50 snow shining on their noses. Monte Rosa’s iced crests straddle the Italian border. Below the heights are the forests, in orchestras of colour.

The larches are the brass section, leading the light in fanfares of gold. Roisin-red maples are the strings, melodies of vermilion and scarlet. Choruses of sun-coloured birch and coppering beeches complete the performance, each tree etched in morning-blue shadow like a soloist.

Everything that is beautiful about autumn seems writ bright here now. As a European I feel intensely lucky to be able to come here so easily, to this glorious source of so much of the art and thought that forms our continent’s sensibility.     

The avalanches of Romantic painting, music and literature this other earth sent across Europe framed ways we still think about nature, soul and mind. Perhaps everyone who walks for pleasure and perspective seeks what Percy Shelley called “the secret strength of things / Which governs thought”.

It runs through all nature, distilling in the mighty places. Shelley saw it on Mont Blanc. Is it waiting on the Aletsch? Looking down, its slalom smear of ice and dirty moraine is the least beautiful part of the gilded panorama.

“The glacier has its own weather,” says Dominik Nellen, my guide. “It will be cold and windy.” The path twists down through millennia, on ground gradually released from the ice. High up, pines and grasses grow on soil composed of decayed plants. We descend between pioneer mosses, lichens and yellow saxifrage; at the bottom there are only stripped rocks. When Byron and the Shelleys toured Switzerland in 1816 the ice was 200 metres above our heads.  

“Put on your crampons,” says Dominik. “We’re going to rope together. Step where I step.”

We zip our coats. Air cools and sinks over the ice creating frigid katabatic currents. We kick crampons between crystal ridges and turquoise slits in the surface. Azure crevasses cut down out of sight as we process into a frozen churn of ridges and bowls. The Aletsch wears its coat of ground-down stones like a protective chrysalis — pour water on a dirty mound and the dust washes off, revealing deep jewel-blue.

The glacier is the heart of the Aletsch Arena, a Unesco World Heritage site — heritage at its most urgent and demanding. “In 70 years, at this rate, there will be 10 per cent left,” Dominik says.

The trek back up is a glory of gilded birches, rusty bilberry and moss on rocks a-gleam with mica. A spotted nutcracker flies between pines. A nutcracker’s tongue forks to points covered with keratin, a Swiss Army knife for conifer seeds. The going is steep, the air thin and it is impossible not to be happy.

“How lavishly does nature in these desolate places dispense beautiful gifts!” Dorothy Wordsworth wrote.

“We come to the Valais every year,” grins a fellow walker, an autumn-struck teacher from Zurich, as we gaze at a birch posing on a slope like a film star in backless gold.

Maples glow anthocyanin-red: as chlorophyll production ceases levels of this compound rise, protecting leaves from harmful ultra-violet and keeping the tree clothed until the strong winds come. We marvel. “The best weather in the country,” he says. “It’s our Mediterranean.”

That night I travel west down the Rhone valley and south to Saas-Fee, a mountain village where life is overseen by the Dom, a 4,545-metre titan and the highest peak entirely in Switzerland. The glacier above the village draws pro skiers for pre-season training. Teenagers commuting to the ski lift the next morning turn out to be Canadian champions.

“My grandfather put a cross on top of the Dom,” remarks Alex Supersaxo, a hotelier whose family have always lived here.

“He must have been a hero!” I exclaim. The peak is plainly of another, lethal world.  

“Not really. Here this is normal. When British climbers came they guided them. Many peaks were first climbed by British and locals together,” Alex grins as he readies his daughter for school.

This is a quietly lovely off-season world, shared with relaxed hoteliers, unpressured guides and walkers. Hammers tap out repairs and preparations. Saas-Fee came to wealth by hand. Buildings stand on the mushroom-shaped stone stilts that defended stores against rodents.

The light is incredible at this time of year, the low angle, the shadows and the shapes

Rather than follow the skiers to the glacier, I take the cable car to Hannigalp, 2,350 metres up, the start point for numerous hikes and the home of a café with a wide terrace and an astounding view.

The still morning zithers with grasshoppers and chitters with glossy black alpine choughs. The sunlight picks out their bright yellow beaks and designer crimson leggings. Joyful aeronauts, the choughs dive and whistle in flying squads.

Toddlers play in sunshine as mountains look on like grandparents on a bench. Then the nearest cracks its knuckles. High up, plumes and puffs of dust explode on the flanks of the Distelhorn in a snapping rumble of cascading rock and snow. The avalanche is more than a kilometre west but a young man serving coffee gives the mountain a reproving look. “You always need to watch the rocks,” he says.

Saas-Fee offers some 350km of marked hiking trails, ranging from strolls to scrambles. I take the Old Chamois trail west, a looping contour path into a mighty cleft in the mountains where the Triftbach and Torrenbach torrents unite and plunge to the Feeru Vispa river.

The walk is staggeringly beautiful. In glass-still air the light plays like slow music, stopping you repeatedly to stare. I have not seen how luminous blue or gold can be, I think, absurdly, before this Alpine sky framed by bright old larches. Trunks tattooed in lichens, these trees are as tall and high-altitude as European larches grow.

Solitary walking now is the opposite of lonely. Nothing trivial and no care accompanies you. You dwell on true riches: on those you love, on beauty, these mountains in their autumn gilding, the way they hymn and trumpet the great fortune of being, gifting your true tiny size. Other walkers pass. We grin like kids. Hundreds of metres above, the ice of the Hohbalm Glacier forms a snarling cliff. We trip-trap across a footbridge hoping we will not wake it.

The path continues, contouring around the mountain and back down to Saas-Fee; lower down, a colony of marmots poke their odd otter-heads out, to the delight of children who have stopped to watch. Marmots have a well-fed look, like bankers who know when to short the pound.

I do not find roast marmot on offer but autumn is hunting season in Switzerland, when game pops up on menus from village inns to gastronomic restaurants. There is deer and wild boar, partridge and snipe; red currants, chestnuts and purple cabbage with everything. I feast on venison in the Arvu-Stuba, and huge salads at Da Rasso on the main street. Restaurants are thick with the cheesy reek of fondue and raclette.

The next day I complete my exploration of Saas-Fee with a “gorge alpine” experience down the Vispa river. I assume this is a guided walk until guide Danny Stoffel starts handing out harnesses. He shows a truck driver, a policewoman and me how to clip on and off the via ferrata — a system of cables, slender planks and bouncy ladders bolted across and along the flanks of a chasm. Now we are suspended in air among pine cones, inching along rock faces, the river way below. We tread over space, exhilarated.

“We have done this all over the Alps but this is the best,” the policewoman exults. It turns out to be a jubilant undertaking, gleefully silly (why terrify yourself 20 times in three hours?), serious in the doing (“If things go south they would go quickly,” Danny grins), and terrific, full-spectrum exercise in a humbling setting.

“The light is incredible at this time of year, the low angle, the shadows and the shapes,” Danny remarks, swinging me on a wire over the gorge. The larches, cliffs and waterfalls all shimmer with extra clarity when you are hurtling at them suspended from a whizzing pulley.

Back down towards the Rhône, the Valais’ lower slopes are covered in vines. I watch my last sunset from Les Celliers de Sion, an “oenoparc” built on the union of Bonvin and Varone, two celebrated producers, where huts amid the vines offer raclette and wine tastings.

David Héritier, director of the Celliers, swirls a glass of crisp and mineral Fendant, the lemony local favourite. “The export market is small,” he says, “because we drink most of it in Switzerland.” You would.

Coming here in autumn to eat and hike like the Swiss, you imagine migrating to these peaks, living at one with Shelley’s secret strength of things, at home with mighty and blazing nature — and a marmot’s grasp of forex variables.

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