Haute Route advice

Last spring I did a self guided haute route trip, with my wife and good friend J who went to Germany after college and went native. We did Argentiere/Grand Monet-> Argentiere hut (plan was for Trient, but bad vis and avy)-> St. Pierre (via train, bad avy conditions) -> Valsorey ->Chanrion->Vignettes -> Zermatt
Tips and brain dump:
Cham:
• Throw down the coin and go to Geneva. Save yourself the pain and throw down for a direct-ish flight. Get a shuttle to Cham, we used Alpy Bus, but there are a bunch. Remember, they are Swiss and run like a Swiss Watch.
• We stayed in Argentiere (Gite Belevedere), should have stay in Cham proper. Search for “Gites” kinda like “hostel” in French. No buses run to Argentiere in the evening and taxis are super spendy.  Otherwise buses in the valley are free or at least we never figured out how to pay for them. Also, consider hotels, super cheap that time of year.
• Hit the Valle Blanche if you can, super wild, big country.
• Cham has a couple great gear shops.
Maps:
• Martigny 282-s
• Mischabel 284S
• Arolla 283s (spelling is right on those ones)
• GPS- I ratted around, downloaded all base maps to my GPS and waypoints. Took me a while, will have to figured out what I did. Also snagged GPS tracks from the web, can send links, worked well for me.
• New book, super good, Haute Route, Chamonix-> Zermatt. Didier Lavigne and Francois Damilano, got mine in Cham.
Money and coms:
• They hate the credit card at the huts, go with Euro or Francs for the huts, figure 100 Euro per person per night.
• Check out insurance, I went with AAC, after reading the wildsnow.com blog not sure that was the right call. Do your homework.
• Cell phones, consider an unlocked one buy a sim card, and charger. I did all wifi calling and worked awesome. My buddy J had a german cell phone, did most of our reservations/day off stuff.
Reserving Hut:
• Do it early (now through Feb). However if a small group, you can get away with it because just about everyone is guided, to they need to fit groups of 4-12.
• I had J make the reservations, since he speaks German and French. He did all reservations via English and email. Guess I was dumb.
Crap to bring:
• Hostel sheets
• Ski crampons
• Climbing crap/axe, harness, glacier stuff, etc.
• Ear plugs
• Light everything
• Swiss hut coffee sucks, bring Via, be happier.
• Hut lunches are not cheap, consider bringing a bunch of your own bars and such for lunch.
• Rope – we brought 60M only to learn the rap on day 2, which we skipped was fixed by the guides. Would have preferred a 30M.
Zermatt:
• Tourist bureau is actually the place to get info and a reservation. 2 star means clean, but not amenities. Add a pool, get a star, add a tennis court, get another half star, 24 hour staff, add a star, you get the idea (FYI, this is the idea, not the exact items in the systems). They have all the beta on all the hotels in town on any given night (like tonight) by star rating, right next to train station.
• Leave your crap in Cham. Go back at end of tour. Or arrange a shuttle.
• Buy shoes in Zermatt at the grocery store (yup), cheap and stylin’
• Zermatt is super expensive, think that you need to have fun and once in a lifetime…..
• Over the hill in Italy the food is cheap and super tasty.
• Buy a Bogner 1 piece, still hip over there.
Guides:
• Different culture over there. Most folks are guided. Respect the history and tradition.
• Guides bring business to huts. Huts take great care of guides, give them special rooms, free booze, etc. It is a business arrangement to get them coming to their huts. Once I figured that out, I did not take it personally.
• Don’t draft guides. That is not cool.
• If you are self guided, that is what it means. The euros move fast and go light, let them pass if you are weaker but not if you are trying to dodge the work of route finding or putting in the track. You will be weaker.
• Some guides will perceive you as a freeloader and someone who is taking away their business by winging it. Don’t be that guy.
• Alps are an unfamiliar mix of civilization, never more than 2-3 hours away, tops. Yet totally uncontrolled, marked or regulated.  Real easy to get dead. Don’t.
• Seriously consider a guide if any of this sounds like either not that much fun, or a lot of work, or if you are not 100% solid guiding yourself. It gets real serious real fast over there, even if there are trams everywhere and towns in between.

Thanks, super helpful beta! What you are saying about the guides is very much what I recall from my 2001 trip to the Alps (7 4000m peaks in 2 weeks, including Matterhorn & Mt Blanc) - the guides, especially on the Matterhorn, ranged from unfriendly to rude. Completely different from my experiences with guides here in the US, on Rainier, Denali, etc.

I haven't done the Haute route but last winter I spent 4 days in the Silveretta range with my nephew.  He did all the planning and reservations.  The huts were in Austria but we were skiing in and out of Switzerland during the trip.  We had beautiful weather, incredible terrain, and very comfortable huts.  You had the full range of easy low-angle skiing or hard-core extreme skiing.  My nephew dropped a 50 degree slope off a ridge that had the euros at the bottom yelling "Super".

Much cheaper than Switzerland.  I think it was about 44 Euros/day/person + wine/beer and a 2 Euro shower.  And everyone makes their lunch out of the cheese, meat, and bread served at breakfast. 

None of the groups we talked to were guided and most people were quite friendly.  Probably helped that we both speak a bit of German.  The few groups that looked like they were guided seemed uptight and standoffish (we just speculated that they were guided, so that might be unfair). 

I would go back to the Silveretta without a guide in a heartbeat.  Needless to say, I would be pretty cautious about venturing off in stormy weather.  The navigation would be tricky in a white-out. We were there in February and it's pretty easy to get reservations during the week.  It also seemed pretty easy to change your itinerary at the last minute as long as it wasn't a weekend with nice weather.  The place was packed on Saturday night and half empty on Sunday night.  Furthermore, the staff was quite stressed on the busy night and super friendly when the place was only half full.

In 1993, a group of 6 of us did a self-guided trip on the Haute Route.  It was before cell phones and tablets were around.   We did the High Level Route, “Chamonix to Zermatt to Saas” described by Eric Bernard Roberts.  It was an old book.

I remember we stayed in the Valsorey Hut for 4 or 5 days due to a large storm.  All the guided groups went down to town because the guides made a change.  We were the only folks in the hut, and we taught our hut warden about 2 for 1 beer in the afternoon.  The most difficult part of the trip was from Valsorey Hut straight up to the Plateau du Couloir, which is a 50 degree slope that had fresh snow.

We also had “The Haute Route, Chamonix to Zermatt” book by Peter Cliff which just came out in 1993.  We arrived at the Vignette Hut, and a person asked us about the weather from the Chanrion Hut.  We talked and exchanged names.  It was Peter Cliff.  We had a great dinner and chat with Peter Cliff. The toilets at the Vignette were great looking down.From Zermatt, we stayed at Monte Rosa Hut and then toured to Saas Fee.

After the trip we returned to Chamonix.  Then with one of my friends on the trip, we toured and skied off Mount Blanc.

Great trip! 

Zap

If you are planning to do the "Classic" route over the Plateau du Couloir you should take a side trip to the Velan Hut. The hut is a nice modern hut and the skiing around the hut is hard to beat (good north facing glaciers and a big descent off the summit). The hut keepers are very friendly and since it's off the standard route it sees very little traffic. Definitely worth the short detour and easy to get to from the Trient Hut in one day.

Full disclosure - I am a guide that has been guiding the Haute Route for the last 10 years but I'm psyched to run into non-guided parties from the states. My French and German is pretty poor so it's nice to run into other 'merican speakin' people in the huts.

Have fun!

Thanks Jeff, we will definitely look at the Velan Hut!