Neue Monte Rosa Hütte

A hut has stood at this site on the lateral moraine of the Gorner glacier since 1895, when the Monte Rosa section of the SAC built a small stone shelter at 2795 m to support guided ascents of the Dufourspitze and Nordend. The first hut was replaced in 1940 and extended several times during the following decades, becoming by the 1990s a famously overcrowded and dilapidated waypoint for the Gorner traverse.

The Neue Monte Rosa Hütte that stands here today was opened in 2009 — a wedge-shaped, aluminium-clad five-storey building designed by ETH Zürich's architecture school as a teaching project under Andrea Deplazes. It is the most overtly modern SAC hut in the Alps and is widely cited as a landmark in high-altitude sustainable construction: 90 per cent of its energy needs are met by photovoltaics and solar-thermal panels, greywater is recycled, and the entire structure was prefabricated in the valley and helicoptered to the site in modules.

The approach has changed character along with the hut. The old route across the Gorner glacier has become substantially more difficult as the glacier has thinned and retreated: in dry summers parties now scramble across moraine and bare rock where in the 1990s they were on ice. The hut's website maintains an annual update on the approach conditions, and the local Zermatt guides' office publishes a recommended route revised every few years.

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