Our ancestors lived a self-sufficient life, following the rhythms of the seasons throughout the year. They continued to carry out the transhumance – the cattle drive between the plains and the mountain – until the 1950s. From the vineyards to the hillside villages, mayen huts and alpine pastures, they walked these paths to care for their crops and their cattle. So our ancestors knew a thing or two about hiking! They trekked up steep and winding mule tracks, making their way between the different stages of the transhumance. This nomadic agricultural lifestyle explains the vertical political layout of the municipalities in the Noble Contrée and the Louable Contrée.
The steep path near the St-Maurice de Laques funicular station acted as a transhumance route between Randogne and Loc. In 1911, Sierre-Montana-Crans (SMC) built an intermediate stop there to allow for a change of carriages at the funicular line’s midway point. The Chemin des Contrées opens up a new route halfway up the hillside between the Noble Contrée and the Louable Contrée. Until 2019, the inhospitable area around the Le Boup chasm and the forests of Les Echerts and Les Chertines were inaccessible.
There are two bridges over the SMC funicular at around 1,000m in altitude. The upper bridge bears the ancient “Chemin des Morts” (Path of the Dead), which connects Mollens to Montana-Village via the hamlet of Nayes. The “Chemin des Morts” is so named because the eastern part of Montana once belonged to the parish of St-Maurice de Laques, to which the deceased had to be taken.
The Chemin des Contrées will take you into a rich and wild natural landscape. The Reverend Father Tharsice Crettol, founder of the folk group Lè Mayinston, wrote these lines in Valais’s Franco-Provençal dialect to celebrate the beauty of the region:
“Ou vyoou plyan dè Tani. Yavit dè flyoour tan bèllè”, “On the old Tani plateau, there were such beautiful flowers.”
Those flowers he so admired in his song are still there to this day.
You will cross several mountain streams to the west near Les Echerts forest and can reach the villages of Mollens or Randogne to the east.
