Walk from La Luette to Sion, Valais, Switzerland

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The weather has been pretty warm across most of Central Europe for the past week or so and a few of the butterflies have come out to play. I therefore decided to take a walk down the Val d’Hérens to see what I could find.

I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t see anything along the upper path leading to Ossona, as the temperature was still only 5 degrees C (41 F). After dropping down to the river, I took a detour to take some photos of the ancient Pont Riva footbridge and was bemoaning my luck, thinking it must still be too early, when not one but two Orange Tips came along at once. Conveniently they were a male and female and they stayed still long enough to get some reasonable pictures.

I then missed two Camberwell Beauties, something brown and a large orange one, but as I got nearer to the (much warmer) Rhone valley, a lot more butterflies and a skipper appeared. I was lucky to capture the Brimstone, as most of them seemed to be taking part in some sort of long distance flight race. And, I wasn’t expecting to see a Comma this early in the year, but I spotted at least 4 in my travels.

Also, it’s funny what you see in your photographs when you go through them. If you look closely at the Pasqueflower in picture 20, you will see a small green resident. And the Comma picture (no. 44) wasn’t my best, but it also had a small creature crawling up the branch, so I decided to include that one in the gallery.

18 thoughts on “Walk from La Luette to Sion, Valais, Switzerland”

  2. As always, I live vicariously through your wanderings. I was also thinking about how wonderful digital photography is for the reason that you can snap with abandon. In the olden days of F I L M, because of the cost and hassle of developing and printing, people tended to be more tentative, too cautious. So yeah, we can take more “meh” photos now, but we also get the magnificent suprises of things that just happen and just show up that we would have missed in the Olden Days.

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    • Yes – it’s a different world altogether ‘these days’. It was only a few years ago my mate Pete used to bring along his old SLR with film in it. He took an absolute AAAAAGE to take a picture – twiddling with this and that to “get the right result”. I fired off 423 ‘snaps’ during my walk yesterday, (which is a lot even for me). I whittled those down to 159, before selecting the best 40 odd for the post. I did wonder about posting a one-off, showing some of the absolute failures before the really good one came along. I think on one of those white butterflies, I deleted 5 or 6 blurred images (well, the back ground was in focus) before a good one appeared (out of the 10 I must have taken). I then pick the best of the ‘good’ ones, crop them maybe and scrap most of the rest.

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    • Thanks Brian. It’s funny, I’d never seen a Comma until maybe 3 or 4 years ago (in Spain as well) and now they seem to pop up everywhere. We have a drop in temperature tomorrow and Wednesday down to minus 8 overnight but then it goes back up to more normal levels (like 10 or 12 during the day). I hope to get out for another big walk on Thursday, if not before.

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  5. Another fabulous adventure taken with you, and I love my knee doesn’t hurt! 😉 Just love these photos, Mike, I viewed them a couple times, oh my there’s that bridge again, I felt something in my stomach flip, lol. In addition to the beautiful landscape scenes, butterflies and flowers, I love the log and ivy shot, nice eye and composition!

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