No Spaghetti on spaghetti traverse… just tortellini, ziti, penne and espresso!

The spaghet­ti tra­verse, is a five day horse­shoe shaped tra­verse that begins and ends in Zer­matt. Although it begins and ter­mi­nates in Switzer­land almost all of the climb­ing occurs in Italy. Each hut is locat­ed on Ital­ian soil (or rock in most cases).

The trek begins from one of the high­est lift ser­vice points in Europe the Klien Mat­ter­horn (3883 m). There is very lit­tle ​‘fluff’ on this tra­verse as two hours after leav­ing the tram you are on top of the first of many 4000 meter peaks, the west­ern Breithorn. 

Each of the first three days of the tra­verse makes a U‑shape. You leave a hut climb up to the ridge tag one or sev­er­al 4000+ meter sum­mits then drop back down to the hut. The climbs are pri­mar­i­ly snow with many sharp knife edge ridges. Sev­er­al options include rocky scram­bles and/​or fixed lines like Pol­lux, and The Naso. 

These sum­mits are option­al and most of the time is spent trav­el­ing across large glacial systems.

Although the climb­ing, and glac­i­er tra­vers­es are incred­i­ble the thing that real­ly makes this trip is the Ital­ian huts. With inex­pen­sive house wines, beer on tap, WiFi, gre­gar­i­ous Ital­ian Hut keep­ers, and most impor­tant gen­er­ous por­tions of Ital­ian food on hand; the huts real­ly make this out­ing some­thing to remember. 

Pie and espres­so for an after­noon snack 

Or maybe a fresh­ly made piz­za, with beer?

Din­ner is gen­er­al­ly served around 7 pm. It begins with your first plate of either a soup or a pas­ta. Giv­en the name of our tra­verse we always opt­ed for the pasta!

Although the first course is gen­er­al­ly more than you would expect to eat in the moun­tains, a sec­ond course soon arrives. 

In this case chick­en, French fries, bread and mixed green sal­ad at 4500 meters!

Even­tu­al­ly after four huts and sev­en 4000 meter peaks reached it was time to descend back to zer­matt, down the grenz glacier.

And sev­er­al tricky sec­tions of the low glacial snouts, up lad­ders, and 8 hours of trav­el, we made it back to the cog rail of the Gorner­grat rail­way that would take us back to Zermatt.

- Alan Rousseau