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Our hardest stages

A LIST OF OUR TOUGHEST STAGES

Our hardest stages

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Introduction

Here we list what we consider to be the hardest individual stages on our trips; the first thing to say (and more below) is that the presence of a stage on this page does not say anything about the difficulty of a trip as a whole, though it can be seen that, generally speaking, our harder trips tend to contain a greater number of ‘hard’ stages.

When thinking about what makes a stage hard, and when thinking of a category of stages that we could call ‘hard’, as in especially hard, we think of distance, the amount of ascent and descent, and the walking underfoot. Smooth tracks are so much less work than rough rock-hopping. Our grade (based on our scale of Walking grades) tries to sort all this out.

We have in mind those stages that demand more of walkers, being above a normal day in the mountains.

Tour du Mont Blanc France Italy Switzerland

Tour of the Vanoise France

Julian Alps Hut-to-Hut Slovenia

 

It follows that these three trips do not have any stages that we say are unduly hard, in this way, though they can still be very tough in the normal run of events!

Kungsleden Sweden

We do not, therefore, regard any stages on this trip as falling into this ‘hard’ category, it being the other trip that we are running to Scandinavia. Of course, some stages are still harder than others, and the day between the Singi and Kebnekaise huts can be tricky in bad weather.

UK and Ireland

Further, you’ll see that because there is no table of notably hard stages in the UK or Ireland, we don’t class these as such. They can still be hard! Many stages on our UK trips for example are long in distance, rather than hard in terms of rough, rocky terrain.

Thoughts about these stages

The Tour du Mont Blanc
Don’t we think the TMB is hard? Yes, we certainly do. We are alert to the difference in difficulty between the Tour du Mont Blanc and the Walker’s Haute Route (Chamonix to Zermatt) being two treks of similar length (two weeks) in a similar part of the Alps. The TMB is a trip that we treat as a baseline for difficulty, being a solid and regular level ‘X’ to which we can compare things. It is nowhere easy, except for perhaps the stage between La Fouly and Champex which has no pass to cross. (Even that one is still a tough day that can catch people out.) The hardest stages of the TMB, though, are achievable by normal walkers prepared to grind through.

The Walker’s Haute Route, by contrast, has four stages, perhaps 4 or 5, that are a step higher: brief stretches of very bouldery or very loose ground in the context of a super-long stage of walking, or a day of unusually rocky terrain, or in the case of the two-day finish into Zermatt (known as the Europaweg) some solidly uphill ground and then some loose ground through and around cols.

Shorter-but-tricky stages
Our Alta Via 1 and Julian Alps Hut-to-Hut trips feature many shorter stages in terms of pure distance, but with tricky bits asking much of balance and mountain-sense. We would not really see these as extremely difficult stages, even if they are in some ways harder than the norm.

Please ask us for guidance about toughness of stages, as you consider your trip. You might want to avoid these harder stages or you might want to seek them out, relish them, and love them!

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