100 hut walks in the Alps - Kev Reynolds

Located amid some of the most beautiful scenery in Europe, the chain of mountain huts strung right across the Alps make exciting and worthwhile destinations for walks of all degrees of seriousness as well as a memorable overnight's accommodation. Huts come in all shapes and sizes from simple unmanned bivouac shelters to bustling mountain inns with hot showers and restaurant service, where walkers can enjoy a degree of comfort without the burdens of backpacking equipment. Extending in a huge arc of more than 1000km (620 miles) form the Mediterranean Coast near Nice to the low, wooded foothills outside Vienna, the Alps display the full gamut of mountain landscape features. With such a varied panoply of dramatic and spectacular scenery, there's nothing remotely comparable anywhere else in Europe - maybe in the World - and for two centuries and more walkers. Mountaineers and general tourists have been flocking there in increasing numbers, and coming away enriched.;This book is a guide to just 100 walks out of the many thousands possible, with a geographical span that ranges from the Maritime Alps of southern France to the Julians of Slovenia, from Italy's Grand Paradiso to the little- known Turnitzer Alps of Eastern Austria, from the ice- bound giants of the Bernese Oberland to the green rolling Kitzbuheler Alps and the bizarre towers of the Dolomites of South Tirol, the routes having been especially selected in an attempt to show the amazing diversity of this wonderful mountain chain. There are walks to suit every taste: gentle and undemanding, long and tough, and everything in between. Most of the routes avoid climbing of a technical nature, beyond the odd scramble aided by a fixed rope. Glacier crossings where crevasses lurk for the unwary have also been avoided in the main, although just a small handful of walks stray onto ice in order to reach a distant hut. And it is, of course, the huts which give this collection a unique flavour.