Skip to content
Pocket Switzerland

Dom

Fly here

Summit · canton of Valais · 4545 m

The highest summit lying entirely in Switzerland, in the Mischabel range above Saas-Fee.

From the basket

Between the Zermatt valley and the Saas valley, a long chain of peaks rises like a pitchfork: the Mischabel. The highest, the Dom, reaches 4545 metres. No other summit stands higher with its whole base inside Switzerland. The few mountains taller than the Dom, such as the Dufourspitze, sit astride the Italian border; the Dom is wholly ours.

From the balloon, its size impresses above all through the height it commands: some three thousand metres over Randa westwards, and as much over Saas-Grund eastwards. Neither village lies more than six kilometres from the top. Across one valley stands the Weisshorn, almost as high; across the other, the Weissmies.

Come in from the west, and follow the climbers’ normal route with your eyes. It starts at Randa, climbs by paths to a hut, then crosses the glaciers to a thin snow ridge. None of the Alpine four-thousand-metre peaks has a normal route as long: more than three thousand metres of climbing, without a single cable car to shorten any of it.

Its name does not mean “dome”. In German “Dom” also means a cathedral, and the peak is named after a canon of Sion’s cathedral, Joseph Anton Berchtold, who surveyed it in 1833. As for “Mischabel”, it is an old dialect word for a hay fork, because of the massif’s aligned points.

Sources: Wikipedia, “Dom (mountain)” and “Dom (Berg)” (in German).

All around