A Little Life in the Alps

I awoke still riding the high from last night’s Swiss cheese shooting adventure, to another picturesque morning. The sun, through patchy clouds, creates a pattern of mixed blues across the wide expanse of Léman. Kind of looks like Cedar’s paint kit when he gets bored and starts mixing colours. I will never grow tired of this view.

I will also never grow tired of being able to wake up each morning and walk 2 minutes out our front door to where the kind fella at the Denner, or the not-quite-as-kind lady at the train station boulangerie, has their plentiful supply of croissants, pain au chocolat, or tornados laid out for purchase. Timed right, one can hit the boulangerie and then Denner as they are coming out of the oven, and then play hot potato (hot croissant) carrying them back up the stairs to our apartment.

It was in this blissful moment of weakness—enjoying a coffee and croissant, meditating on the beauty of the lake, recalling my last evening’s cheese-shooting triumph—that I agreed to do something I probably should have thought through more: go hiking.

Not just the kind of hiking I’m used to—the lakeside Riviera, cappuccino in one hand, Mövenpick ice cream in the other, kind of hiking. The real Sheila kind of hiking. The kind where you go uphill. Like, on a mountain or something.

In this case, a gorge. The Gorges du Chauderon to be exact.

Both Sheila and Cedar seemed excited about it, and being that it was one of the ‘bucket list’ things we wanted to accomplish on the trip, who was I to protest?

Backpacks loaded with essentials, we headed out on our trek, which took us downhill from Chernex to Montreux, then up through the incredibly beautiful ‘old town’ part of Montreux, onward to the gorges. This was our first time exploring the old town. With its plentiful cafés, crêperies, and maze of neat old buildings and cobblestone alleyways, it holds a high prospect of return when we have the time to stop and sample our way through the local gastronomy.

This, however, was not in the cards today—we were on a mission to conquer the Gorges du Chauderon. And conquer we did—albeit backwards, and with likely more difficulty than most people. Which is generally typical Lum fashion.

The entrance to the hike is pitchforked in two directions: one that leads to the left and into what looks like a forested gravel path, the other looked to be stairs—stairs pointing straight up the side of a cliff. The cautious and common-sense hiker, the kind with a five-year-old doing his first hike, the kind that reads the instructions and the comments on AllTrails.com, would likely have chosen the easier-looking (and correct) path to the left, instead of the cliff-grind vertical stairs to the right.

AllTrails and instructions be damned.

And Cedar, taking more after his mother in this instance, decided the shortest path between two distances is a straight line. A straight vertical line upward. And up we went.

The Gorges du Chauderon is a beautiful hike and winds its way through the Gruyère Pays-d’Enhaut Regional Nature Park, following along the Baye de Montreux river. I know this because, after we finished grinding out 1,155 stairs straight up, I checked our hiking app, saw the incredible pictures other people had posted, and also noticed we had been hiking the route backwards—and completely missed that part. The stairs were supposed to be on the final return loop of the hike, not the start.

AllTrails be damned (again).

Undeterred, we found our way through the tiny village of Glion, refilled our water bottles, and course corrected. At this point we could have done the reasonable thing and rejoined the downward leg of the hike back through the gorge—and more importantly, in the direction of La Rouvenaz terrace, which I envisioned had a chilled Aperol Spritz waiting for me.

But we are not reasonable. At least, my two teammates are not.

Instead, we chose to keep traveling upward toward Les Avants, where our frequent readers will know we have some history with the artisan market—and Cedar, the bouncy castle.

With this goal in mind, we completed the next 6.8 km of vertical ascent, Cedar and Sheila blazing trail, and me huffing along behind, in a far enough distance so as not to hear my grumbling.

At the risk of this ‘hiking’ stuff becoming routine here, I’m hesitant to go on about how beautiful the hike was, and what an overly pleasant experience it was sitting in the sunshine in the park as a family, enjoying our picnic and watching the paragliders corkscrew down from the mountains above, and how relaxing and accomplished one feels after a good hike…

I’m not certain this wasn’t the plan all along—Sabine and Sheila, conspiring. Swiss Bouge, Running races in Bern: all a tricky gateway drug into hiking.

As I’ve said before, the Swiss are outdoor people. And the country—and its infinitely beautiful scenery—is purpose-built for those willing to sever themselves from their screens and explore it.

And explore we shall.