Stephen Olivant writes:
This year’s trip was to the beautiful valleys and quiet peaks of the Gran Paradiso National Park. It used to be a huge hunting reserve for the King of Italy and it has more alpine wildlife than anywhere else I have been in the Alps. We were south of the Mont Blanc massif, so we had better weather than the Chamonix valley. It is easily reached from Chamonix, via the Mont Blanc road tunnel, and I would recommend a visit in winter or summer.
Graham Ball and I joined a Ski Club of Great Britain party led by Bruce Goodlad IFMGA accompanied by Guy, an aspirant guide who had decided after finishing medical school that the NHS didn’t offer enough exciting outdoors work for him. Both Bruce and Guy are smashing chaps and I have signed up for Bruce’s tour in the Silvretta next year. There were three other members of the party including Roger Hobbs, who was on his ninth consecutive week of ski-touring trips… what a marvellous way to spend retirement!
We drove from Chamonix through the tunnel towards Courmayeur and, because the weather forecast was poor, we spent our first day off-piste skiing at la Thuile. I had stayed in this nice little resort on a family skiing holiday years ago, but I was quickly lost when Bruce took us up from the top of the highest lift into clouds and deep snow like well-cooked porridge. Roger broke one ski pole during the ascent but, amazingly, seemed to be able to skin up and ski down without it. He must have been practising during the preceding eight weeks.
We stayed overnight in a splendid old style hotel just off the main road to Aosta and had the biggest meal I have eaten since I was a student. It was a special Easter feast and we lost count of the number of courses the elderly non-English speaking owners loaded onto our table. How they smiled when we held our stomachs and rolled our eyes after each course.
The second and third days were in the lovely Val di Rhemes. We drove past the hamlet of Rhemes Notre Dames to the valley head and then skinned up to the Benevolo hut in the morning. There, we dropped off our overnight stuff and went peak bagging during the afternoon and the next day. The snow was much better than at La Thuile and we had some beautiful skiing down 1,000 plus metre routes chosen by Bruce and Guy.
After staying overnight at Rhemes Notre Dames, we drove round to Pont in the neighbouring valley and set off up a long track up to the Vittorio Emanuelle hut in burning sunshine. Whilst enjoying lunch on the terrace of this amazing 3 storey curved aluminium hut, I left the skins on my skis in the sun, so that some of the glue on the skins transferred it itself on to the skis. Everyone on the terrace enjoyed the sight of me rubbing the skis with my fleece gloves for the next hour or so to get the amazingly sticky skin glue off. It’s a mistake I shall only make once in my life.
We were away early next morning and skinned up the huge shoulder of the Gran Paradiso, before using crampons and ice axe for the last steep snow field. We kept our crampons on for a scramble to a rocky summit with a famous statue of the Madonna. The 4,000 metre summit is the highest (wholly) in Italy and gave a wonderful sunny panorama of the whole Mont Blanc massif and the descent chosen by Guy was the best continuous skiing of the week. The next morning was cloudy, so Bruce and Guy used their excellent mountaincraft to find an excitingly steep ski descent to the main valley. From there, we slalomed around boulders and a scary half-hidden torrent back to the cars at Pont.
Three weeks later, on a 1,200 km cycle trip from Geneva to Venice, and I was able to look across a valley at the Gran Paradiso and have the quiet satisfaction of having shared its summit for a few minutes with the Madonna