GO ITALY: Going silent, crouching into a balancing stance, and ignoring the fact that if she slips she dies. EMMA CULLINANlives to tell the tale of a life-affirming journey in the Alps
A SMALL TRUCK stops beside us unbidden. “Valgrisenche?” the man says. “Si,” we reply, employing a tenth of our Italian lexicon. He gestures into the back of his truck. Climb aboard.
We smiled and shook our heads, tempting as it was. We had come on a walking holiday, so we’d better walk. He shrugged and drove off. We turned left into a meadow and set off on an idyllic two-hour walk alongside a river in a wooded valley with a snowy peak in the distance.
This was a short start. Himself planned our seven-day walking route along the Aosta Alta Via 2, which runs from the Italian ski resort of Courmayeur over mountains to the town of Champorcher. We began at Planaval village having taken a bus up from Aosta, a town with an ancient amphitheatre and grand streets with vast mountains looming over the charming shops. Scale was to be a theme of our holiday.
The walking route runs from rifugio to rifugio on mountains – or to hotels in valley villages – with no stops in between: no coffee bars, no brands, but if you’re lucky, the occasional stone-built shelter to huddle against storms in.
Online guides – and local signage – estimated each day’s walk at around five hours. Who knew if we could do it? We sit at desks all year looking at computers, but if that was the route then presumably it was humanly possible, even if I had done no training.
And so we walked into a green world passing a sun-drenched vegetable patch, being tended by a man bent before a tiny church. And up a rippling river, which we were compelled to climb into, and through hamlets. It was an easy walk, ending at a guesthouse run by a family who leaned out of the window as we arrived shouting, “They’re here”.
The following morning we began our first climb beside a dam with hardly any water in it because of geological and structural problems. Five towns were swamped in its construction and a church spire still sticks out of the shallow water. People were forcibly moved and made ill, the woman of the house told us over a breakfast of local produce, including a honey of millefiori.
We saw some of those thousands of Alpine flowers as we climbed through a forest. Purple, blue, yellow and white, growing where the trees let in light amid long emerald grass that waves in the wind. Buttercups, primulas and dandelions provide the yellow. Cowslip, white; bluebells, geraniums, pastel clover, and forget-me-nots in the blue-purple spectrum. And rubbery red flowers, like beetroot and fire, crop up occasionally – showing that saxifraga is wont to bloom in the right conditions.
The forest floor is brown with pine needles: singularly dangerous when alive and now, lying beside millions of brethren, making a soft, foot- forgiving carpet. We cross mountain streams and stop to absorb the positive energy from the negative ions thrown up in the cool spray.
This climbing makes you gasp and sweat. I slow down not wanting to do either. I wish to walk at a pace my body can cope with.
As we finally climb above the tree line, baby rhododendrons appear as do dog roses and purple pansies – that stalwart of suburban gardens proving that it can do wild things on mountain tops.
A loud whistle shrieks across the rocky landscape hammocked between peaks. We discover its source as we walk past a village of smooth-edged holes pocked into yellow earth walls that rise above our path.
It had been a marmotte warning its mates that we were in the hood. One didn’t get the message and floats with speed – back legs splayed – like a flatfish over the grey bolders that camouflages it. The more ungainly and clumsy a furry animal, the more endearing.
Finally, the rifugio appears and the valley below – with its villages – disappears. We are truly in the mountains. The walk was meant to take two and a half hours but it has taken us three and a half.
THAT SECOND day set the tone for the holiday, beginning in woods and then climbing out above the tree line on to weather-scored earth and tumbling scree. The walks taking longer than the signs said: on many days we spent eight or nine hours in the mountains.
Others went faster – what few others there were and most were going in the opposite direction. Local guys bounced over the mountains on thin, brown muscly legs; parents took teens on character-building exercises and small, mixed groups tackled the climbs together.
The Earth is forever pushing the Alps upwards, but the weather counters that by pushing rubble off the cols (saddles below mountain peaks that you pass over) and hauling them down within glaciers, some of which melt in the summer leaving nature’s slag heaps exposed.
It was one of these we climbed over on the third day after an uphill from the rifugio where sheep grazed at unreasonable heights. The scree pile was so sheer I became quadraped as I clambered to the col to be met by a cliff edge over which we were to begin our descent. It creates chest-crushing fear.
That was another feature of this expedition: there’s no going back because often that option is worse than going on. It had taken us five or six hours to get to this point and we had a hotel booked way down in that valley we could see in the distance. Beyond that was a vast mountain: the first half of the next day’s walk. The scale is mind altering: our expectations and achievements have to adapt to match it.
So we set off down with butterflies in our mouths. Those flowers whose beauty we’d delighted in were now being called upon for their life-saving properties – I clutched them hard, along with clumps of grass, as I crept along downwardly-angled dusty paths that etch across a sheer slope.
In places the path disappeared, having been washed away by rock slides that you have to clamber over. Near the base of the mountain is a fur-patched skeleton of an animal who didn’t make it. And finally, legs having skanked downhill for hours, beneath a battering sun, we reach a road and another mountain lesson. It turns out – after consulting many locals in the village – that our hotel is in a ski resort one kilometre down the road.
Mountain rule: never, ever imagine you’re at your destination until you are in situ because when an exhausted body thinks it’s time to turn off, it is extremely hard to work up the spirit to go again.
That evening we can barely walk down the stairs to dinner and the next morning our legs have seized. No matter, onwards we go, with our worldly goods on our backs (weighing a neat 7kg) with the woodland start now a part of our daily routine – we get wild orchids today.
After hours of climbing we pause on a boulder for a picnic, stopping before the final ascent as instructed by the hotel receptionist, who said it would be hard-going in the shale. These rocks didn’t feel as if they’d settled in and, as I clambered over them on all-fours clinging to boulders for safety, I hoped it wasn’t their time to tumble.
Over the top and then a downward stomp in which each step shot pain through my legs until I popped ibuprofen which eased the agony but left the edge.
We took a path along a ridge with a random pile of vivid blue rocks crossing it. A large cross stood proud on a ridge framed by a huge mountain across the valley: our next day’s climb. But first to the valley floor and a walk that went on and on until I was too tired to go any further. Not that it was an option, the hotel was at least an hour away.
But up here you learn how beauty acts as an opiate for a tired body. Mountains throw startling things in your way to wake you. First, we walked through a marmotte study area where two creatures sat on a rock and stared at us, less shy than their brethren, as if used to being watched.
With hearts softened, we entered the world’s largest cottage garden. Here the flowers had seeded in swathes and blue geraniums ran for acres, splattered with white cowslips, while pink-poker-topped grasses swept across meadows.
As I went to bed that night, puffy eyes stared at me in the mirror. What was I doing to my body? I wondered as I went to sleep before our longest climb yet, up to Col Loson at 3,298m (Ireland’s highest is Carrantuohill at 1,038m).
I later learned that high altitude makes the eye area swell – and we’d been pushing about 3,000m a day (equalling more than Everest’s 8,848m over a week).
HALFWAY UP the mountain, a man warned us not to go on because there was a storm coming, but we’d already walked for hours and, even if we went back down, we’d be caught in the tempest.
So, as we gasped at thin air, crossed snow fields and passed Ibex grazing at high altitude, black clouds rowed towards us from distant mountains and the sound of thunder rolled with them.
It echoed on the valley walls around us and crashed off into the distance. Lightening struck about wildly and we watched with nowhere to hide.
At the top, when we thought the worst was over, we were reminded of the lesson about not calling an end to things until you reach the finishing line.
We are lulled into a false sense of security when walking across a thin ledge teetering over a precipice; it had a rope, secured into the rockface, to hang on to. Another mountain rule: don’t look down.
But the next ledge had no rope. It couldn’t be attached to the “rock” made up of wafer-thin strata that came away in your hand if you held it.
These millions of splinters had dropped onto the path to create a sandy surface that, pushed by the feet of many trekkers, sloped downwards. This two-foot wide slippery beach with no safety net for hands to grab onto is our path.
We go silent, crouch slightly into a balancing stance, and try to ignore the fact that if we slip we die. And creep across. Then there’s another one.
At the last one I freeze and urge myself out loud to go for it. And then it’s over.
We silently trek down to Rifugio Vittorio Sella, part way down the mountain (at 2,584m) and dine that night with two German priests and share a post-meal drink with a wild mountain guide from Chamonix, and his entourage.
When I ask in a cafe in the valley when the pouring rain will stop, the barman says Tuesday – that is five days away and we nearly give up. But then the clouds clear and we go on, which the spirit finds difficult, until the most beautiful flower meadow yet opens up at the base of the long valley. We walk up to a rifugionicknamed "Shining" by travellers we met the night before. We can see their point in the building's design, but the staff are nowhere near as terrifying as Jack Nicholson.
The following day we trek with final-hurdle determination up a steep col of Finestra di Champorcher and way down the other side into Champorcher village.
We are slightly bemused at what we’ve achieved – if I knew then what I know now . . . no way. We marvel at what humans can do if pushed beyond their boundaries and are happy that we have been so, so far from the commercial world, relying on ourselves, up where the mind runs free and nature’s beauty makes your heart sing.
Get there
We flew to Begamo with Ryanair (ryanair.com) and took a train to Aosta (two changes) and then a bus. Milan and Turin are closer and also accessible by train.
. The Alps where to . . .
Stay
Day one: Paramont Hotel, paramonthotelristorante.com
Day two:Maison Bovard, maisonbovard.com
Day three: Rifugio Chalet de l'Epee, rifugioepee.com
Day four:Hotel Boule de Neige, bouledeneige.net
Day five: A l'Hostellerie du Paradis, hostellerieduparadis.it
Day six:Rifugio Vittorio Sella, rifugiosella.com
Day seven:Rifugio Sogno di Berdzé, rifugiosogno.com