The Johnslingtons

Think of the perfect mountain town. It’s small, warm enough in summer to hang out outside at night, but cool enough for sleeping. There are amenities enough to keep you fed, and it’s easy enough to get to, but not so much that it’s overwhelmed with people. The scenery is stunning, and the trails for admiring it are plentiful and well-marked. 

Oh, and the place you stay has a hot tub, for soaking after a day of punishing your legs. 

Sounds cool, right? But how do you find such a place? 

Maybe the best thing to do is look to the past. 

On my first round-the-world trip I sometimes picked places to stay based on the flyers at hostel counters. If you liked a hostel, you might take a few of their flyers to your next destination and leave them for other people to find. While in Budapest in September, 2001, I picked up a flyer for the Chalet Martin, a backpacker hostel in the Swiss Alps up the way from the main rail line to Geneva. I loved mountains, and one of the Australians I was hanging out with said the place was “mad.” 

That was enough for me, so I went. The Chalet Martin had fire pits and guitars hanging from the walls, easy access to trailheads where you could hike for hours (which I did), and common areas where you could spend a rainy day next to a fire just reading (which I also did). It was in a nice little town with a grocer, a butcher, and a produce market. The name of that town? Gryon, Switzerland.

This past April I was mucking around on Airbnb, and saw a listing in… Gryon! The place had a hot tub and a play structure with a view of the Swiss Alps. I showed it to Julie.

“Book it,” she said. “For a week.”

I did. So we went. We trained from Rome through Milan to Bex, where we rented a new car from the smallest Europcar outlet I’ve ever seen; it was just a gas station with one rentable car parked out front. The drive up the hill was twisty and steep. We turned off to a barely-one-car-wide road into town, found our turnoff, and met our lovely hostess, who showed us around her guest apartment. It was exactly as advertised, with one heckuva view.

The nearest big town (Villars) had an adventure playground, a community pool, and a big supermarket. The little town of Gryon still had a butcher, but he’d been integrated into the grocery. And there was now a cafe. The Chalet Martin, alas, closed in 2020, presumably a casualty of the pandemic. But those were the only changes from what I remember, because the mountains had stayed the same.

We spent our sunny (and a little cloudy) days walking in those beautiful sawtooth mountains.  We did foothills walks along with hundreds of cows. We hiked to a knife-edge ridge, singing “The Bear Went Over the Mountain” to get us up the last bit. We ate at little mountain restaurants, savoring Swiss cheese and glacial-melt water. Sharp rocks ripped my shorts. We took a cable car to a desolate peak. We spent a rainy day touring salt mines. In the afternoons we swam in the town pool and soaked in our little hot tub.

On our last day we met up with some San Francisco friends at Glacier 3000, which is the best kind of tourist trap – the kind that blows your mind and makes your knees quake. We hiked across the glacier on a day that alternated between sun and clouds. We took a break at the Refuge der Pierredar, where we feasted on a cheese plate (adults), chocolate cake (kids), tea with brandy (adults) and hot chocolate (kids). The hike back was hard – none of our shoes were waterproof and the kids were tired. Hiking in snow at 10,000 feet will do that to you.

We left a little sad, feeling like it was a little too soon to go. It’s not often you get to spend a week in a perfect mountain town. Twenty years on, Gryon still was exactly that.