Up in the Alps…and some downs as well

_{WARNING: Take your time with this one. There’s a LOT of photos.}

After our adventures in Milan, we were looking forward to a more straight-forward (and less disastrous?) time in the Valle d’Aosta, the area of the Italian Alps bordering France and Switzerland. Three years ago, Jess and I had hiked from hut-to-hut and town-to-town in Switzerland, following the “Hiker’s Haute Route” roughly from Mont Blanc to the Matterhorn. This time, on the Italian side, we would be following Alta Via 1 from a bit east of Monte Cervino to Monte Bianco…which, believe it or not, are the same two mountains…just with Italian names! Like in Switzerland, it was incredibly beautiful, with the mix of craggy peaks, forests, pastures (with cows!), and the occasional mountain “Alpe” or “Arp” (buildings) scattered about.

If you’ve never done this type of hiking before, I highly recommend it. It’s like backpacking in that you are always sleeping in a new place and don’t have to go back to your car every day, but instead of carrying a tent, sleeping bag, and a week’s worth of food, all you need is enough clothes to stay warm and a few snacks. Every afternoon you arrive at a mountain hut or a hotel in some little valley where you can (sometimes) shower, and (always) get an enormous hot dinner and a decent breakfast before setting off the next day. The huts vary from luxurious to bare bones, but all meet the minimums needed to keep you going. And, like backpacking spots, they tend to be in gorgeous locations.

Anyhow, I’m not going to give you a blow-by-blow of the ups (nearly a mile some days) and downs (over a mile on other days) of the hike. But, here are a few of the highlights and lowlights and my top dozen-or-so photos from each of our seven+ days of hiking.

PHOTOS: Day One (Rifugio Vieux Crest to Rifugio Grand Tournalin)

Shortened Trip and a side trip. First of all, it was originally supposed to be nine days, but we missed the first one due to passport replacement needs (see previous post) and we skipped one day because it was supposed to rain all day and was scheduled to be our longest day of hiking. On the day we skipped (day six), we took a cab (because there are no buses there on Sundays) from the tiny little village of Ollomont back to the central city of the valley, Aosta. We did laundry (yay for clean clothes after five days of hiking!) and then grabbed a bus to go up to the Great Saint Bernard Pass (conveniently near where we were spending the night to start the next day’s hike). While the day hadn’t been as rainy as expected in Aosta at 2,000 feet above sea level, it clearly was up at the top of the mountains. When we reached the pass, we were dumped from the bus in the middle of a cloud with a howling wind. We could barely see where we were going and it took a minute to realize we weren’t even near the site we had hoped to visit, the St. Bernard Museum (where you can see the St. Bernard’s in their kennels and occasionally walking around). We set out to cross the border from Italy to Switzerland to reach the museum and decided it would be more fun to hike around the lake at the pass rather than to walk on the road. This was the ultimate nail in the coffin. We wandered in the mist for some time, barely made it over the Swiss border (I have the GPS records to prove it!), gave up and returned to the Italian-side bus stop to have hot chocolate before our ride down for the night.

Speaking of clouds…that wasn’t our worst “caught in a cloud” moment. That came on day two of our hike. As we crossed our first major pass, we were briefly caught in a cloud, but then dropped below it for a bit, only to have the clouds come in to surround us with a vengeance (see video below). As soon as we were completely trapped, the clouds let loose with sharp pea-sized hail. Jess, Sarah, and I were already in our rain coats by then, so after huddling together for a moment, we decided we might as well keep hiking since huddling wasn’t going to make the hail stop any faster. We were wrong. Literally the second we started walking, the wind and hail increased in intensity enormously and we ran back to huddle by the rock we’s been sheltering next to before. To add insult-to-injury, we later learned that if we’d been about half-an-hour ahead on our hiking, we’d have missed the hail completely…

PHOTOS: Day Two (Rifugio Grand Tournalin to Rifugio Barmasse)

Friends along the way. The first four days of our hike we shared the route with a small group of other hikers who were following the same itinerary. There were four older Germans we chatted with several times along the way, most notably when one of them, Rudi, fell and cut his head on a rock. He was OK, but I ran ahead to catch his companions who were unaware of the drama a few hundred meters behind them. One of the other couples, Italians, were particularly sweet, and offered to help Jess and Sarah when I arrived at one of the huts half an hour before them (on a particularly long, hard day). Probably most fun were Mauricio and Silvia, a couple of Italian day hikers who we met as we were arriving in the town of Oyace with mere minutes to spare before the bus we hoped to catch. They led us on a race through town with a brief pop into the bar to confirm the bus stop location (though, how hard can it be–there’s only one road!). Upon our return to Oyace the next morning, we saw them again, as we were all gearing up for our respective hikes.

PHOTOS: Day Three (Rifugio Barmasse to Rifugio Cuney)

Losing a friend along the way. Unfortunately, Sarah had to drop off the hike after four days. In particular, the downhills were incredibly steep, wtih bad footing, and cliff-edge drop-offs. There may or may not have been some (in Sarah’s words) “snot crying” involved, but by-and-large she did well overcoming adversity and adjusted to the harsh terrain pretty well over the time she was hiking. It was just too mentally exhausting by the end of day four to go on, so she spent some time bopping around some of the Italian hill towns and meeting us on the nights we were in accessible hotels rather than mountain-top rifugios.

PHOTOS: Day Four (Rifugio Cuney to Oyace)

Great, and not so great, food. Food experiences had some major ups and downs as well. High points included the unexpected appetizers at Rifugio Grand Tournalin on our first night (awesome bread with goat cheese and herbs), the most amazing gnocchi with bleu cheese ever at Alpe de Rebelle (a B&B we stayed in near Oyace), and the locally made prosciutto in Saint-Rhemy-en-Bosses. All three of us also discovered that panna cotta–even cheap middle-of-nowhere-rifugio panna cotta–is pretty awesome. A little chocolate sauce or fruit on top…yum. On the downside, some of the rifugios had very basic offerings (I had minestrone as my “primi” the first three nights and it went from delicious at Grand Tournalin to flavorless at Cuney), and the hotel we stayed at in Ollomont served all their food in a room where the walls were literally covered in ibex skulls with a particularly vicious looking taxidermied boar head staring us down. Probably the most memorable food was the Valdaostan (as in the Valle d’Aosta, where we were) soup we had at Rifugio Frassati. The soup was advertised as being cabbage-based, but it had only a tiny bit of cabbage. The main ingredient was about a half pound (per bowl) of fontina cheese, along with some potatoes and a bit of sausage. There might have been some extra butter too. It was probably the richest thing I’ve ever eaten. It was both delicious and horrifying at the same time. Of course, this feeling was compunded when the next course consisted of polenta (more starch) that had cheese and butter mixed in. Jess and I ate this by scraping from the middle to keep the butter moats along the outside. Again, delicious, but way too much. I did not feel well the next morning.

PHOTOS: Day Five (Oyace to Ollomont)

Sleeping up high and down low. The first two rifugios gave us our own room for the three of us, but when we got to Cuney, a far more remote location, the entire place just has two tiny dorm rooms. In order to accomodate a sufficient number of hikers, rather than having two levels of bunks, they have three tiers (each with five narrow beds on one large shelf), so some people are on the floor (the Germans), some people are about 4-feet up (us), and some people are another 4-feet above that, pressed against the ceiling. Luckily we weren’t on the top level, but it was still a challenge to get in and out without crushing each other, smashing our shins, or clonking our heads. On the brighter side, the Hotel Suisse in Saint-Rhemy-en-Bosses was incredibly cute. The whole village is about a dozen buildings nestled in an incredibly narrow little wooded valley just below the St. Bernard Pass. Instead of a room in the main building, we had our own little cottage with a double and single room duplex-like situation. It was truly lovely. And…they have stuffed gnomes in the window of the dining room. Cute, right?

PHOTOS: Day Six (Day off, St. Bernard Pass)

Wilderness and wilder kids. As mentioned earlier (and shown in the photos), the landscape we traveled through was gorgeous beyond belief. On our last day, Jessica and I squeezed through a pass no more than 5-feet wide and about 8-feet long, and from that narrow gap we could see the Grand Combin out one side and Monte Bianco out the other. That was pretty awesome (though maybe not as good as the views of the Matterhorn a few days earlier). While that was our last day, the previous night was spent in Rifugio Frassati (the one with the Valdoastan soup). This hut was less than ten years old and had been built and was run by a nonprofit organization (Operazione Mato Grosso) that raises money for projects in the Peruvian Andes. We had a great discussion with one of the organization’s members and also discovered that they run the organization–and the hut–in a completely non-hierarchical and fairly unorganized manner. The hut is staffed by a different assortment of families each week–usually four or five adults with a gaggle of kids running around. We were served dinner by one kid, shown to our room by another, given tea by a third, and loved watching a very serious 8-year-old girl stomp around always looking for something useful she could do. It was chaotic and fun–a little goofy at times, but generally everything got done and with alot of smiles and laughter along the way.

PHOTOS: Day Seven (Saint-Rhemy-en-Bosses to Rifugio Frassati)

By the way…did you figure out by now that Jessica is almost always ahead of me when hiking? I was too lazy to do it, but I thought about inserting a set of pictures specifically designed to challenge you, dear reader, to find the dot that is Jessica in the distance in some pcitures. If you’re bored, go back and see how many you see her in.

PHOTOS: Day Eight (Rifugio Frassati to Courmayeur)

Wildflowers. OK. Last thing. There were soooooo many wildflowers along nearly every step of this hike. Every 5 minutes there would be a new mix of colors and shapes, and it made the need to constantly stare at our feet because of the tricky footing not such an impediment to enjoying the hike. I took photos of a few dozen diffrerent flowers and I’m sure I missed half of them. Here’s a few of my favorites…starting with my absolute favorite flowers, a variety we only saw a few times. (Also, for the record, there were also soooo many mushrooms, but I don’t enjoy taking pictures of them quite so much.)

Now we’re off for one more adventure with Sarah…wandering around the Italian Piedmont from town to town and vineyard to vineyard (why don’t I like wine?!?) for the next few days before she returns to the US. More later. Hope everyone is doing well.