On Thursday Bryn and I drove round to Italy with a plan to climb the Gran Paradiso on skis. It is the only 4000m mountain that sits wholly in Italy and is therefore very popular with Italian mountaineers. The summit sits at 4061m and makes a great ski tour. We skinned from the car at 1900m to the Vittorio Emmanuel Hut (2735m) in the afternoon sunshine. The hut was reasonably busy but we fluked our own room and so a good nights sleep.
It snowed lightly through the night and we set off at 6:30am Friday in fresh snow. There were several other teams out with the same idea as the photos show but we soon spread out and enjoyed some solitude.
The climb was enjoyable at a good steady plod, with a couple of steepenings to catch out my skinning technique! We arrived at the summit for 11:00am which was a bit of a bottle neck as it has a short scrambling section to reach the Madonna that sits on top of Italy.
The ski down was on great snow, this type of travel in the mountains really gets you thinking about snow and avalanche avoidance and is also pretty rapid! We were back at the hut by 12:15pm and that was taking it steady because of my weary legs! The final descent to the road was the hardest part of the day as the ground is very steep through the trees but was very pretty.
A cracking couple of days out and a beautiful way to explore the mountains.
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