Four days in Tessin: Poleggio to Anzonico

We take the 6 am train from Basel and after a couple of trains and a bus are ready to start hiking from Poleggio at  9:30. The first part of the day was part of G’s very long run last year, so some of the nice up, up, up, through the woods is familiar to him. It’s pretty warm and humid, but fortunately we are under trees as we head up up and along the Via Alta. The plan is to take a trail up towards the ridge from Bodengo, but it turns out not to be trivial to find this one and we don’t want to spend our time fighting uphill through the woods, so we continue along the via Alta until we hit the trail up just past Bidre. 

A food break and then more up, up, up to the ridge. This bit is really nicely graded and G has to watch himself to avoid going faster than he should. Through the lovely few houses at Tenciareu (they even have a gondola up!). Once on the ridge (still in trees so no views) we do another food break and then continue onto the other side, past the Capanna Plan d’Alpe, then up and back to the ridge. Once there we follow the ridge along and up, up to the Matro. This has a horrible structure on it but otherwise nice views (too bad about the clouds to the East). 

It’s running late-ish, so we opt to head down from here. There’s and unmarked use trail with some cairns (and the occasional faded old red/white marking) that leads us efficiently down to Puscett. Here we pick up a marked trail/road which we follow, mostly flat, along the slope until hitting Suaggia, where we pick up another unmarked trail which leads us down, down, down to Anzonico.

We find the hotel, check in, have showers and a rest, enjoy a good pizza, have a walk through town, and then go to bed.

This was a long day, but it felt longer than it was. There’s loads more to come, so those legs better wake up! ;-)

Track:

Stats: 8:04, 22.4km, 2050m up, 1390m down