Welcome to the first-class cabin
A US company is attempting to reinvent the hut-to-hut Alpine hike, with guides, gourmet food and luxed-up mountain refuges
High above Sainte-Foy-Tarentaise, not far from the ski resorts of Val d’Isère and Les Arcs, my hiking boots crumbled to nothing.
Jake Beren, bearded chief guide of the adventure company Eleven Experience, pulled away the sole like a wet plaster. “You’re toast,” he said. My friend Pete Jinks was watching. “Well,” he said. “At least they reflect your physical decline.”
We’d just topped a 2,500-metre col, the peak of Mont Blanc sparkling in the distance, and descended a short distance to Lac Noir. I gazed about; under a hot blue sky, patches of melting snow revealed crumbling schist dotted with sentry-like marmots. I pulled a pair of sandals out of my daypack.
The guides looked sceptical, but there wasn’t much choice. Our destination, six hours on, was a luxed-up shepherd’s hut, and a bad pair of boots wasn’t going to get between me and its Haute-Savoie lamb marinated in Turkish chilli, olive oil, lemon, mint and garlic.
Founded in 2011, Colorado-based Eleven specialises in skiing and fly-fishing adventures and has created 13 small, no-expense-spared lodges in remote locations, from Alaska to Iceland and New Zealand. Many offer opportunities to go to places few others get to see — a fishing spot in the Andes accessible only by helicopter, say, or a private ski area in Colorado’s West Elk Mountains.
But almost anyone can walk through Europe’s high Alps. It’s an egalitarian pastime I fell in love with while walking off a crisis in Bavaria, stumbling into a farm where a dirndl-clad fräulein offered me a frothing glass of fresh milk. (“I found it moving,” I said to Pete. “I think that may be just you,” he replied.)
Since then I have whistled my way through multi-day walks in the Austrian Tyrol and the Italian Dolomites, paying €50 a night for a bunk and dinner in the company of strangers.
Now Eleven is bringing a very different approach to the hut-to-hut Alpine hike. Its walk starts from the ski chalets it owns in the hamlet of Le Miroir, a couple of kilometres north of Sainte-Foy, and joins the dots between two revamped shepherd’s huts, ending up over the mountains and border in Italy’s Valgrisenche valley. Each property has been carefully renovated under the very particular eye of Eleven’s owner, the former Blackstone property executive Chad Pike, who has just started the real estate investment firm Makarora.
This seems part of a trend that has seen money pouring into the Alps and Dolomites, despite concerns about melting glaciers and declining snow levels. International brands are arriving in a region where hotels were traditionally owned by local families — Six Senses in Crans-Montana, for example, Aman in San Cassiano, Como on Alpe di Siusi. Eleven will charge €1,500 per person for its three-day walk, on top of the already considerable rental for one of its two chalets, Pelerin and Hibou. Any milkmaids, I imagined, would be wearing Loro Piana and serving Vecchio Negronis.
I arrived late at Chalet Pelerin, joining my friend Pete and four executives from Eleven who had flown in to try the new walk themselves. After a breakfast of homemade granola, local yoghurts, eggs and cheese, we headed uphill to the foot of a via cordata. We would literally climb the first 200 metres.
Unlike a via ferrata, a via cordata doesn’t have a safety wire you clip into to offer protection as you climb. Instead, you are roped up and belayed like a proper rock climber, though there are metal steps and handholds to assist you. “Maybe it’ll be like one of the treetop things you do with kids?” Pete said hopefully.
A look at Jean-Noël Gaidet, a lithe and rangy mountain man of 54 who is Eleven’s manager in France, suggested otherwise. He had helped build this route up the rocks above Le Crôt. The key was not to look down. That’s because you’d see, in the depths of the valley, an exquisite little restaurant called Le Garde Manger, a far more sensible place to be.
“Don’t crush yourself against the cliff face,” Jean-Noël called. “Keep your weight on your feet, not your hands.” Soon I had scuffed knees.
Jean-Noël’s wife Julie was waiting at the top with electric mountain bikes. The slope up was steep enough for hydroelectric pipes to come the other way but the bikes made easy work of it. I considered shouting “Allez, allez!” at the open-shirted French we passed, heaving their manual bikes up the slope, but thought better of it.
The ground flattened out in the Ruitor valley, dragon-friendly peaks on every side. We pulled up outside Refuge Les Molettes, the first of Eleven’s two huts. A hummus lunch was waiting in camping caddies, an old cattle trough full of bottles of beer and rosé.
Further into the valley is the public refuge, the Refuge du Ruitor. There, hikers sat in twos and threes at vinyl-covered tables. Below were tightly packed bunk rooms. They had the moral high ground in their ascetic simplicity, but we had toys: the harnesses for climbing, electric bikes and the fly-fishing rods I would soon use to catch mountain trout in a nearby stream.
As the sun set, Anna Pearce, our chef, arrived. The picnic table was set for dinner, a fire pit was roaring red. I submerged myself in the glacial stream, and was given a giant fleece gown in which to wrap myself.
looked up at the hut across a meadow of wild rhubarb, buttercups, blue monkshood and mountain arnica. The walls had been rebuilt traditionally to a roof of heavy stone slabs, tight against the eaves to protect it from the licking winds of winter storms. Inside, sheepskins roamed in flocks. It was all heavy wooden floors and bunks, walls decorated with antlers.
Anna offered up a fondue of Emmental, Beaufort and Abondance, cut with Chignin-Bergeron and ancient grain mustard. This was followed by barbecued côte de boeuf served with chimichurri.
Eleven’s senior staff were great company, but they were still strangers, and I was about to share a bunk room with them after too much Gorgonzola. So in the early hours I found myself outside, enjoying the air while nursing a sore face from walking into an antler. The Milky Way was beginning to slip into the dawn. Silent figures passed in the twilight, packing ice-axes, heading towards a glacier shimmering high above.
The following day, I sat on the mountaintop gazing at my ruined boots. The day’s walk was only 14km, but involved an ascent of 1,100 metres and a descent of almost 1,300 metres. It would take eight hours, and we’d only just topped the first of two passes.
Eleven’s style of hiking is that there is no need to carry a backpack — everything you need turns up at the next stop — so it was lucky I had brought my sandals. With my toes now in the open air, I looked up at the heights of Mont Pourri, literally “rotten mountain”, as I was warned against cuts and breaks.
Jessica Chelaouchi, Eleven’s local guide, pointed out an old traverse, but said the rockfalls were too lethal. “You startle chamois and they send rocks bouncing down towards you.” So instead we headed down into the depths, to the public refuge of Archeboc, before beginning to climb again. That ascent was tough. I was being reminded with each step that, now 55, I need to take fitness more seriously.
The Alps spread out around us. I was wondering why everyone is so obsessed with high passes, when there are lower trails through the pastures where I might bump into people who make homemade génépi, when we reached Col du Mont, the border between France and Italy. We were on top of the world.
It seemed too steep for Hannibal’s elephants, but there were scars of other battles, from the early part of the second world war. Old barbed wire fences had been remade into sculptures. It had also been a famous smuggling route. I wondered how far away Napoleon’s troops had passed.
The opposite slope, facing east, still had a covering of snow, so I put my boots back on, Jake securing the soles by wrapping my feet in duct tape. He pulled a small set of crampons from his pocket. Eleven’s price might be steep but it was beginning to feel like good value.
We descended into Valgrisenche, Pete and I catching up with each other’s lives, one of the great pleasures of walking distances. Finally we fell to silence. (He had been reading Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, where the poet writes: “The presence of another person does not detract from, but enhances, the silence, if the other is the right sort of hill companion.”)
I’d be lying, though, if I didn’t admit I was squeaking a bit by the time we turned down a trail towards the most picturesque of cabins. While I would have happily composed a praise poem to Chaco, the manufacturers of my sandals, I was footsore and ready to drop.
The stones on the roof of Eleven’s Rifugio Valgrisenche lie like fish scales, its dark wood terrace aimed towards the heights of the long, snaking valley. In winter the cabins will be used for the company’s heli-skiing operations when, under snow, they become truly remote, the public refuges closed.
Guests will swish down from the peaks on the Italian side of the border into these cut-off places to find staff who have skinned their way up on skis to look after them. This leads to slightly discordant notes come summer. The bunk room sleeps eight, 10 if you count the double bunks, under too fluffy duvets and behind thick tartan curtains. The centrepiece is a decorative sleigh.
However, raised from ruins and finished just this year, the rifugio is definitely Shepherd Hut 2.0. Unlike Refuge Les Molettes, it has a flushing loo and a truly gratifying shower. As we ate our barbecued lamb outside, we looked down to the Cappella di Chatelet, a chapel in the depths of the valley that held the last of the sun until all else had darkened around about.
The next morning, before a two-hour drive back to the start at Chalet Pelerin, we went canyoning, another of Eleven’s slate of summer activities. Rappelling into a crisp river turned out to be a cure for the walker’s cramps. As I drifted in the current, it occurred to me that all this was a bit like flying posh. Into the cattle class world of alpine hiking, Eleven has introduced first class cabins. I’d disapprove, but Anna had prepared some parmesan aubergine pancakes and I couldn’t resist.