Walking in the Alps. Kev Reynolds

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      Traditional buildings in the Val Savarenche, Eastern Graians

      Val Savarenche

      Road access to this valley from Valle d’Aosta is the same as that for Val di Rhêmes until Introd, from which handsome village superb westward views show the Italian face of Mont Blanc shining in the morning light. Val di Rhêmes and Val Savarenche are similar in their lower reaches, both being narrow, heavily wooded V-clefts that open to green pastures. Val Savarenche is a little wilder than its neighbour, though, and with the Gran Paradiso itself forming the main attraction, shared equally with the next glen to the east, Valnontey. This dividing ridge is, however, not solely of mountain interest on account of Gran Paradiso, for the northern end proudly boasts the shapely Grivola (3969m), and there’s also the Gran Serra, Herbetet and other notable peaks that draw the eye with their graceful forms. Several hamlets are spaced along the bed of the valley, all of which have some form of accommodation. There’s camping to be had just south of Creton, a wooded campsite (Camping Gran Paradiso) a little further upstream on the true right bank of the river, and another more open site at the roadhead at Pont, while no less than four huts provide accommodation on the walling mountains: Albergo Savoia and neighbouring Rifugio Citta di Chivasso set upon the Nivolet plateau at the extreme south-west end of the valley, and Rifugio Chabod and the ever busy Vittorio Emanuel rifugio on the east flank below the glaciers of the Gran Paradiso.

      Not surprisingly this is one of the busiest of all valleys in the national park, but since there are no cableways or other forms of mechanical aid, the only way to see the best on offer is to leave the road and take to the footpaths, a number of which date back to the days of King Vittorio Emanuel II who kept a good part of the valley as a hunting reserve, and many of whose mule-trails remain to this day.

      The Chabod & Vittorio Emanuel huts

      Once again walkers’ passes on both flanks of the valley provide opportunities to move from one side of the walling ridges to the next, but there are also some fine walks to be achieved at mid-height along the steep hillsides. Probably the very best is that which links the Chabod and Vittorio Emanuel huts. It leads through some rough country, with rocks and boulders and glacial slabs, and with the tongues of glaciers hanging just above, their streams dashing down in long ribbons. Ibex can often be spied from this trail, and in early summer alpine flowers add much to the walk. The Chabod hut is reached in two and a half hours from the road by a fine walk through larchwoods and a green upper corrie backed by the Herbetet–Gran Paradiso ridge, followed by a more stony landscape with a final pull up a spur that provides a magnificent viewpoint. Above the hut a path climbs to the Col Gran Neyron below the Herbetet – this has a via ferrata descent before linking with another trail to cross Col Lauson into the Valnontey. The route to Rifugio Vittorio Emanuel, however, breaks away from the Chabod path below the hut and makes a roughly south-bound traverse, remaining about 800 metres or more above the valley.

      The most popular route for climbers on the Gran Paradiso begins at the Vittorio Emanuel hut, and this voie normale follows more or less the route taken by the team that made the first ascent in 1860 (J. J. Cowell and W. Dundas, with the Chamonix guides, Michel Payot and Jean Tairraz). The hut itself is an incongruous building once described as ‘reminiscent of an aircraft hangar with its ugly aluminium roof’. Janet Adam Smith called it ‘a gigantic aluminium dog-kennel stridently out of keeping with the setting of pasture, rock and snow.’ With a guardian in residence between late April and the end of September, it can sleep almost 150, while the old hut nearby can take another 40. In 1924 Dorothy Pilley and her husband, I. A. Richards, spent a night there prior to making an ascent of Gran Paradiso, but they were not happy with what they found on arrival: ‘The hut ... was a disgrace to humanity’, she wrote. ‘Only the most confirmed of Alpine Romanticism could overlook the polluted state of the environs. A slope of garbage tippings fell from the doorstep into a rancid little lake ... With all nature in their favour, with sun and wind and water to keep the site clean, it is sad that people should mark their presence with filth and stench.’ (Climbing Days) A decade later and Janet Adam Smith also complained of a dump of tins and rubbish, but happily the hut and its surroundings were soon improved, for in 1939 R. L. G. Irving was able to describe it as ‘a delectable place’. Irving of course was an Alpine romantic, but he was not blind to the squalor created by men in the mountains. Yet the Vittorio Emanuel clearly charmed him. This is what he says about it in The Alps.