These ancient walkways in the Swiss Alps make for easy mountain trekking | Canada Voices

When my mother was 40, she and her best friend Anne did the Tour du Mont Blanc: a 170-kilometre trek around the snow-capped mountain that straddles Switzerland, France and Italy. They rented hiking boots, slept under coarse woolen blankets and lived on cheese and chocolate. There’s a photo of the two scantily clad friends sunning themselves on the roof of an Alpine hut, their clothes stretched out around them to dry.

Looking back, I realize this was quite an audacious trip. Both women were working full-time and enduring intolerable husbands. This was their Thelma and Louise moment (except that they came back alive).

Now approaching 80, my mother is still going strong. I wanted to take her back to the Mont Blanc area, but I knew a 170-km hike wasn’t in the cards. Looking for a more accessible alternative, I discovered an incredible network of Alpine hikes along les bisses.

The bisses (the French word, pronounced “beeze,” is also used in English) are irrigation channels that direct glacial melt from the high Alps down into the fields and pastures of the valleys in the Valais region of southwest Switzerland. The oldest date back to the 13th century and the system is still in use; some 80 per cent of the farmland in Valais is still watered this way. But in addition to their agricultural function, the bisses make ideal hiking trails; the paths next to them are well graded, never steep and generally five to 10 km in length, an ideal distance for those not looking to set world records. In recent years, the canton of Valais has been promoting the bisses as a tourist attraction. My mother and I were attracted.

Half the fun of travelling in Switzerland is the travelling itself. We pulled into the town of Brig on a train that had taken us from the high plateau south of Bern through an impossibly long tunnel to spit us out in the Rhône Valley. Brig, which developed in the Middle Ages as a trans-Alpine trading post, served as our base.

On a balmy August morning, we took a PostBus – the successor to the stagecoaches that once carried passengers and mail – up a hair-raising ascent to the Simplon Pass that leads into Italy. As we headed into the clouds, a man at the back of bus began to play the accordion. Just like that.

We got out in Simplon village, and followed the bright yellow signs indicating hiking trails out of town and into the woods. Soon we could hear the telltale burble of flowing water and found ourselves on the Chrummbacheri bisse (try saying it). Lined with ferns and Alpine flowers, it led us along a mountainside, past ancient, slate-roofed farmhouses and hay fields. Looping back to town, we took another PostBus, descending through a granite gorge into Italy. Soon we were dining on pizza and lemonade in the Piemontese city of Domodossola, before returning to Brig by train through a tunnel that was, for most of the 20th century, the longest in the world.

The genius of Swiss transportation logistics was on full display at Fiesch, where we transferred from the Matterhorn Gotthard train through an airy terminal to a cable car that took us up 1,200 vertical metres to a midway station. A second gondola lifted us over craggy cliffs to reach the Eggishorn summit. Here we entered an otherworldly landscape of rock and sky. Stretched out before us, at an incalculable distance, was the massive tongue of the Aletsch Glacier, carving its way down from the snowy peaks. The sight was literally breathtaking; visitors picked their way across the boulders and shale in awed silence.

Riederalp, on the high plateau, is home to an improbable nine-hole golf course and restaurant serving the local specialty known as cholera: pastry filled with raclette cheese, pear, leek, potato and onion. The dish is said to date back to a 19th-century cholera outbreak when quarantined Valaisans got creative with their leftovers (if only COVID had produced anything so delicious). From here, we took a gondola to the Moosfluh peak, to be greeted by a friendly herd of Braunvieh cattle. We hiked along the mountain’s crest, a scrubby terrain of dry grass and rock, fixated on the Aletsch Glacier beneath us.

My mother and I share a gene that draws us inextricably to open water (and compels us to travel with bathing suits). When we passed the Bettmersee lake at 2,000 metres, we knew we had no choice. Leaving our clothes in a tidy pile on the shore, we strode down the dock. It was brain-numbingly exhilarating.

The canton of Valais is divided by geography and language. Leaving the German-speaking Upper Valais behind, we took a train westward, following the course of the Rhône River to the francophone Lower Valais. Our destination was Haute Nendaz, a resort village that, in the winter, offers access to the 4 Vallées, one of Europe’s largest ski areas. We checked into a wellness-oriented getaway on the edge of town. Misleadingly called the Mad Retreat, the place is a collection of beautifully restored traditional chalets with a dining room that serves refined vegetarian cuisine, and a heated outdoor pool where my mother and I pickled, watching swallows fly circles over the valley below.

This is bisses country. We took a short bus ride to the hamlet of Siviez, and followed the yellow signs to the stack of wooden blocks that indicate a bisse. Clouds hung in the high spruce trees, and clumps of raspberries dangled along the path. Built in 1865, the Bisse de Saxon is an engineering feat, with tunnels blasted through the granite, and steel cables securing rock overhangs. The wooden cabin that housed the bisse’s first guardians still stands.

On another day, we hiked directly out of Haute Nendaz along the Bisse du Milieu, which wends its way, through the fields and pastures that it still irrigates, to an auberge serving fondue and plum cake on a sunny terrace. We returned along the gradually descending Bisse Vieux, marvelling at four centuries worth of building materials – from old wooden troughs to steel-lined channels.

Before leaving Valais, we made one final stop in Champex-Lac, a sleepy holiday village that wraps along the shore of a turquoise glacial lake. Here, too, my mother and I had to swim before finding our way through the woods to the local bisse. We followed it upward, alongside a mountain stream, to emerge on a meadow of pink sage.

There was an inn with a shaded terrace full of hikers. As we dug into a couple of wild blueberry tarts, my mother suddenly got up and went inside. When she came back out, she was smiling. She recognized the stove pipe: in another life, she had wrapped her wet socks around it to dry.

If you go:

Maps and descriptions of the best bisses walking trails in Valais can be found on the tourism board’s website. valais.ch/en

For those who prefer a package, Eurotrek offers an eight-day “Chemin des Bisses” tour. See https://www.eurotrek.ch/en for details.

The Swiss Travel Pass, which covers all public transit, makes it easy to get around. A three-day adult second-class pass costs 254 Swiss Francs ($441).

Special to The Globe and Mail

The writer was a guest of Switzerland Tourism, which did not review or approve this article. Stories are based on merit; The Globe does not guarantee coverage.