On the 5th of August, a group of eight officer cadets from the University of London Officers Training Corps set off on the long drive from Bloomsbury to the Aosta Valley in northern Italy. Having driven across the plains of Champagne and the Rhone-Alps, the group emerged from the Mont Blanc tunnel on a bright alpine Sunday morning with their object in sight, the glistening peak of Gran Paradiso, the highest summit in Italy.
The expedition’s aim was to take a group of keen novice climbers and introduce them to alpine climbing techniques in a challenging environment. Far from the traditional “yomping” found across Brecon and the Lakes, the group had to learn how to walk with minimal kit, stay cool in the sun and warm in the wind and learn how to traverse and ascend glaciers with crampons and ice axes. This and the altitude of the mountain, standing at an imperious 4061m, posed a significant obstacle for the participants of the expedition, and all efforts were made to allow for acclimatisation and sufficient training.
Having camped at an already lofty 1900m in the Aosta Valley and issued gleaming new kit (leant from the Army loan pool stores) to the climbers, the group set off for the Riffuggio di Vittorio Emmanuele II at the base of Gran Paradiso itself. Hunched on the side of the mountain some 800m above the camp site, the StarWars-esque zinc-clad refuge made a tantalising target for the first day’s walk in the midday sun, wearing in new boots. Having settled into their room, the students were able to drop their ropes and gear and take in the surrounding view. All around in a panorama rocky moraines and snow-capped mountains rose and fell to the clinking of goats’ bells beyond the dammed stream on the mountain’s side.
Feet taped and prudent layers of factor 50 applied, dinner was served in the main rooms of the refuge, the perks of the Italian way of mountaineering were about to be manifest. After nibbling on bread from baskets on the long wooden tables, a pasta course was served followed by the “primipiatti” and a choice of desserts; blancmange, cheese or fruit. One wonders what the Highlands’ equivalent would have been, were it applicable. It was to be proven however that there was good reason for the carbohydrate-rich diet supplied, when bright and early the next day the group clambered up to a nearby glacier to begin their introduction to the techniques used when climbing on ice.
Confident of their new-found abilities, the first group of four cadets to attempt the summit packed and repacked their bags that night in anticipation of an early start, incongruous to the normal student lifestyle, the next morning. A couple of bowls of coffee and a few slices of bread and honey was all that was needed to line the stomachs of the eager quartet before lacing their boots and checking their head torches for the 4am departure across the neighbouring boulder field. A snake of luminous climbers curled its way up a thin stream of ice melt to the snowline a couple of hours’ trek above the refuge. Roped into threes, one instructor to two cadets, the team started sinking crampon after crampon into the ice blanket in front of it and fixed its eyes on the crepuscular apex stood sentinel above.
By 9 o’clock, despite shortness of breath and depleting stocks of energy, the team stood beneath the watchful gaze of the 8ft Madonna on the rocky peak of Gran Paradiso on the edge of the glacier just climbed and the vertiginous north face of the mountain. Perforating the banks of fluffy cloud below them the Mont Blanc ridge stretched away to the north and the rest of Italy tapered off to the south. The Dent de Geant could be seen jutting out from the Mont Blanc ridge some 50km away. Not being able to stop for long, for fear of the negative effects of the minus fifteen degrees temperature on weary legs, the obligatory selfies were no sooner taken than the team had to turn on the spot and trace its own tracks down to the refuge and to a well-earned sit down.
A couple of days later, sat around a fire pit in the camp site in the valley waiting for their barbeque to cook, it was general consensus amongst the officer cadets that climbing the tallest mountain in Italy was one of the best things they’ll ever do, and certainly one of the best things before breakfast time of a Wednesday morning.
OCdt Ivo Almond
