ALPINE CLASSICS
he Gran Paradiso is the highest mountain entirely in Italy. It lies between Valsavaranche and Val di Cogne in southern Aosta and is the centre of the Gran Paradiso National Park.
This park has protected the landscape from ski installations: a rare and welcome feature in the Alps. Most alpinists start from Valsavaranche, but, despite the mountain’s popularity, facilities remain modest. The area has retained a savage charm common to much of the Aosta region.
In September, 1860, John Cowell, his friend William Dundas and guides Michel Payot and Jean Tiarraz made the first ascent by what has become the normal route: the West Flank. “Considering the great height of this mountain,” Cowell notes, “and that one can get up it with little fatigue and no danger, I think it one of the most easy and luxurious expeditions that can be made.” The Piccolo Paradiso Traverse and the North-West Face provide more interesting adventures. The latter is a particularly attractive climb and is great training for bigger alpine lines. The route climbs an elegant 400m face of snow and ice to reach a narrow ridge that is followed to the summit. In good conditions the route has both low commitment and few objective hazards.
THE CLIMB
In southern Aosta the weather had been stable for five days, and the snowpack had become safe. However, following a recent accident, my sleep was disturbed dreams of avalanches, imagining a wild cornice collapsing from the summit ridge. Having already climbed
56 | CLIMB. WALK. JOIN.
the North-West Face three times, I was surprised that such a familiar route stimulated such vivid dreams. The next morning, Valentine and I drove slowly up Valsavaranche, found a coffee on the way, and finally parked at 9 am at the bottom of the path leading to the Chabod Refuge. Still bound by the influence of Rousseau, Wordsworth and Byron, I find myself seduced by the rough rustic charm of this region. The Italian locals seem more open and friendly than in the neighbouring Swiss or French valleys, perhaps as they haven’t spent the last two centuries besieged by such numerous hordes of foreign tourists.
Although it was the first time I’d been here in winter, I found every part of the journey punctuated with memories. I remembered how, in the car park early one summer, a fox came up to us, so tame that he inspected our packs with the curiosity of a domestic dog. Now it was -15ºC, and we scrambled to pull our boots on and get moving as quickly as possible. The path, laboriously crafted in neat cobblestones, zig-zags up a steep wooded hillside. Now, in winter, the snow lay a metre deep and the path was icy and tricky to climb on our skinny skis. There aren’t many high mountain routes that I would consider amenable propositions in the middle of winter. However, I knew that the North-West Face would be good training for getting back onto bigger routes as the spring progressed. In 1860, Cowell and his team endured days of rain before they finally headed up the valley to attempt the peak. He wrote with heavy-handed romantic hyperbole so typical of Victorian literature: “The lower part of the Val Savaranche is grand and gloomy, and seemed to us almost oppressively dark under the heavy shade of the threatening storm clouds; but the upper half of the valley is flat, uninteresting, and singularly bleak and bare. After tramping steadily along the valley for seven hours, we turned to the left and began climbing a precipitous path which led to the solitary chalet and dreary pasturages of Mont Corve.” These summer chalets still exist at Montcorvé, only a short distance from the current site of the Vittorio Emanuele refuge and the normal route up Gran Paradiso. “The remaining hour of daylight was spent in examining the high peak to the east of us, which we supposed to be the Grand Paradis… During supper we tried to learn from our host something about the geography of the surrounding region; but he could tell us nothing. His father and grandfather before him had occupied the chalet for 105 years; yet they had no name for this mountain, and
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