Switzerland · CH

Pas de l’Illsee

High above the town of Leuk, the Pas de l'Illsee is a wind-scoured saddle at 2,545 m that marks the meeting line between two very different Valais: the sunny lower Rhône valley below, and the wild, lake-studded cirque that spills down toward the mountain village of Chandolin. Reaching it means earning the altitude, whether from the Leuk side or up from Chandolin, but the col is the reward in itself, a wide open notch ringed by peaks with a string of tarns glinting at its feet. This is not a road pass but a hiker's, ski-tourer's and mountain-biker's notch, the kind of place where you stop at the crest to take in a panorama that runs from the Bernese Alps across some of the Valais's great 4,000-metre names. Below the col sits the Illsee reservoir and its dam, set in a cirque that visiting mountaineers describe as the real spectacle of the crossing.