Panoramic balcony trails in the Alps

Seven high traverses with a view, from Seceda below the Odle to Rifugio Bertone facing Mont Blanc and the Wettersteinwand balcony trail in Bavaria.

A balcony trail is a path that, instead of heading for a summit, runs for a long way at height along the flank of a mountain, with the valley on one side and the peaks on the other. It is perhaps the most generous way to walk in the mountains, because the effort is concentrated in the initial climb, when there is one, and then the view stays with you for hours, changing slowly at every bend. Some, like the one through Daloo and Lagunc in the Valchiavenna, follow mule tracks built to link villages and summer pastures long before any hiker arrived.

The most famous of the group passes Rifugio Firenze and Seceda, at the foot of the Odle walls in Val Gardena, but the others are no lesser. In the Aosta Valley, Rifugio Bertone and the Testa della Tronche face Mont Blanc across the Val Ferret; in the Upper Engadine, the balcony path from Silvaplana to the Maloja Pass runs above the lakes of Silvaplana and Sils; above Montreux, the Rochers de Naye looks out over Lake Geneva. Shorter and quieter are Rifugio Cristina, above the larch woods of Valmalenco, and the balconies of Daloo and Lagunc over the Chiavenna plain, while the Wettersteinwand balcony trail, from Garmisch to Mittenwald, is a traverse of 32 kilometres and twelve hours that calls for good legs and a long day.

Good to know

In German these paths are often called Höhenwege, high trails, and the name is bound up with the history of organised mountaineering. From the second half of the nineteenth century the sections of the Alpine clubs built huts across Tyrol and the rest of Austria and, to reach and connect them, laid out paths that ran for long stretches at height from one hut to the next, so that today almost every Austrian mountain group has its own Höhenweg. The idea has also crossed borders: the Tiroler Höhenweg, for instance, came about through cooperation between the Italian and Austrian Alpine clubs, which joined existing paths and opened new sections to link Tyrol with South Tyrol.