Up in Switzerland, Down in Italy: Three Days on the North Ridge of Piz Badile

Val Bregaglia → Val Masino, early August 2026.

Crew: Andrea, Lucia, Pietro and me.

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Some mountains you find; others have been waiting for you. Piz Badile (3,308 m) stands on the border between Switzerland's Val Bregaglia and Italy's Val Masino, a blade of grey granite with one of the most elegant lines in the Alps drawn straight up its edge: the North Ridge. Eight hundred metres of clean rock, first climbed in 1923 by Alfred Risch and Walter Zürcher, rising almost without interruption to the summit. I had kept a photo of it in my head for years, filed under one day.

This August, one day finally had a date. Three of them, actually.

The itinerary

• Day 1 — Bondo (1,250 m) → Rifugio Sasc Furà (1,904 m)

• Day 2 — Sasc Furà → Piz Badile (3,308 m) by the North Ridge; night at Bivacco Redaelli

• Day 3 — Piz Badile → Rifugio Gianetti → Bagni di Masino (1,172 m)

Day 1 — Walking in

The approach from Bondo is a warm-up with a view: a few hours of forest and granite slabs, gaining height steadily until Rifugio Sasc Furä appears on its rocky promontory at 1,904 m. From the hut, the ridge is right there — silvery, foreshortened, improbably long. We ate early, sorted the rack, filled the bottles and set the alarm for an hour that still counts as night.

Day 2 — Ten+ hours on the edge

4:00, alarm. 4:30, out of the door into the dark, headlamps sweeping the scenery. 6:00, at the base of the ridge, tying in as the first light came off the rock.

Then we climbed. And climbed.

The topo keeps the difficulties mostly in the UIAA IV range with a few steps around V, and that's true — but on the Badile the grade is not the story. The story is continuity: pitch after pitch after pitch of slabs, cracks and flakes, the valley floor dropping away on both sides, and the great north-east face — the wall where Riccardo Cassin wrote history in 1937 — hanging in shadow to our left. More than ten hours of climbing, and not one dull metre.

I climbed the whole route as a second. Let no one tell you the second is a passenger: you climb the same rock, you carry the pack, you clean every pitch — and you get something rare in exchange: time to watch. To watch how a leader reads the granite, chooses a line, places protection, stays calm and keeps moving. The North Ridge was a ten+-hour masterclass, and I took notes on every pitch. Now I can't wait to bring those notes to the sharp end — leading adventures like this is the next dream, and after these three days it feels less like a dream and more like a plan.

By late afternoon we pulled onto the summit, and then came my favourite decision of the whole trip: we didn't go down. The tiny yellow Bivacco Redaelli sits just below the top, with just enough room for the four of us. We watched the sun set over the Bregaglia, ate what was left in the packs, and stayed out on the warm slabs while the sky filled with stars. Rébuffat called his book about these walls Étoiles et tempêtes — stars and storms — and that night we were granted only the first half. « Nous sommes à notre place », he wrote of the Badile. We are in our place. I have never felt it more literally.

Sitting up there, I kept thinking of Goethe, who sat on a bare granite summit in 1784 and wrote Über den Granit:

„Auf einem hohen nackten Gipfel sitzend und eine weite Gegend überschauend, kann ich mir sagen: Hier ruhst du unmittelbar auf einem Grunde, der bis zu den tiefsten Orten der Erde hinreicht. [...] Diese Gipfel haben nichts Lebendiges erzeugt und nichts Lebendiges verschlungen, sie sind vor allem Leben und über alles Leben."

"Seated on a high, bare summit, surveying a wide landscape, I can say to myself: here you rest directly upon a foundation that reaches down to the deepest places of the earth. [...] These peaks have produced nothing living and swallowed nothing living; they stand before all life, and above all life."

Two hundred and forty-two years later, at Bivacco Redaelli, it read less like philosophy and more like a caption for the view.

Day 3 — Down into Italy

We went up in Switzerland and came down in Italy: the summit of the Badile sits on the border, which makes this descent the most beautiful customs crossing I know. The south side is a route of its own — downclimbing, abseils, ledges and gullies — until the angle finally eases and Rifugio Gianetti (2,534 m) appears below like a promise of coffee. From there, a long, knee-testing, glorious trail through Val Porcellizzo took us down to Bagni di Masino (1,172 m), where the trip ended the way alpine trips should: sitting down, boots off, already replaying pitches out loud.

What the Badile gave me

A school, above all. Three days of moving through big terrain with Andrea, Lucia and Pietro; ten-plus hours of granite that asked for steadiness more than strength; a night at 3,308 m that I will be replaying for years. It was, by some distance, my greatest climbing adventure so far — and the clearest signpost toward the next ones.

Ad maiora.

The beta

• Route: North Ridge (Spigolo Nord) of Piz Badile, Risch–Zürcher, 1923. About 800 m, mostly UIAA IV with steps around V. Long and sustained — endurance matters more than any single hard move.

• Our times: Bondo → Sasc Furà in the afternoon of Day 1; alarm at 4:00, away at 4:30, roped up at the base at 6:00; 10+ hours on the route.

• Sleeping: Rifugio Sasc Furä (1,904 m) before the climb; Bivacco Redaelli, tiny and unstaffed, just below the summit — treat it with care and pack out everything you bring; Rifugio Gianetti (2,534 m) on the way down.

• Descent: the south-side normal route — downclimbing and several abseils — to Gianetti, then the trail to Bagni di Masino.

• Water: essentially none on the ridge. We carried our full supply from the hut.