Acclimatising | Saas Fee, CH

Matthew Cannon
Jul 16, 2017
1 min read

We arrived in Saas Fee 3 days before setting off on the TMR hike. In order to get used to the altitude we took a few short hikes around Saas Fee and went up onto the glacier at Allalin to see what it is like walking on the snow and ice. We decided to take it quite easy during these days as we don't want to tire ourselves out before the hike.

We visited the mountain guide office in Saas Fee to ask what special equipment we will need and to find out if we need to take a guide. The answer was, "Good boots and no". It is July so quite early in the season for this hike but the weather in town is about 20C and up on the glacier at 3500m it was low single digits centigrade, although sunny with low wind. The guide office people told us we don't need ropes, belts to clip to wires or crampons even for the section of glacier just after Zermatt, provided we take the right route, which we describe when we get to that stage.

We are planning to stay in a combination of quite comfortable hotels (7) and mountain huts (2) so will not be bringing camping equipment or large amounts of food. I list of the equipment we plan to take is shown on the Equipment page.