Walter Bonatti’s ferret: the Tour du Mont Blanc from Italy to Switzerland

This is the second of four posts describing our trek around the Tour du Mont Blanc in September, a classic 170km circuit of Western Europe’s highest mountain. After starting out from Chamonix and walking the western section through France, described in my previous post, we arrived on the Italian border at Col de la Seigne. The story continues from there.

In 2015 Edita was living and working in Rome, a two-hour drive from Gran Sasso, a range of dramatic limestone peaks rising above the Adriatic Sea. Many of the peaks encircled a high alpine meadow called Campo Imperatore, which became a popular ski resort in winter. Towering above them all was the giant fortress of Corno Grande (2,912m), the highest mountain in the Apennines.

I bought the Cicerone guidebook Walking in Abruzzo (since updated) and discovered that, precipitous as it appeared in photographs from Campo Imperatore, Corno Grande had several routes that were well within our capabilities as experienced hillwalkers.

One day in January, armed with the Edizioni il Lupo 1:25,000 hiking map of Gran Sasso, ice axes, crampons and microspikes, we headed out of Rome to climb Corno Grande. Unsurprisingly, the Apennines in winter are a different proposition to the mountains described my guidebook, frequently buried beneath metres of snow. It wasn’t until July that year, on our third attempt after all the snow had melted, that we finally made it to the summit.

By then we were deep into a romance with the Apennines. Abruzzo, the region of Italy on the opposite side of the peninsula from Rome, contains several mountain parks. Each has its own character and each provides a feast of exhilarating day hikes for keen hillwalkers like ourselves. Although Abruzzo has a small trekking community, the trails were quiet compared with similar peaks back home in Britain, and the weather was much more reliable.

I moved to Rome myself, and we spent many weekends exploring the hills, staying at cosy B&Bs in quaint mountain villages and enjoying delicious Italian food. Our fascination with the Apennines lasted until long after we left Italy in 2017. We returned again in 2019, but then covid happened; international travel ended and I had not returned to Italy since.

That was until this September, when our trek around the Tour du Mont Blanc (or TMB) took us up to Col de la Seigne on the southern side of the massif. This was the border between France and Italy. You can read about the French section of our trek in my previous post. The journey continues here…

Day 4, part 2 – Col de la Seigne to Courmayeur

We stood atop a giant plateau, carpeted in scree. To our left, the glaciated needle of Aiguille des Glaciers (3,816m) towered above. We knew that Mont Blanc was up there somewhere too, but it hid behind a curtain of cloud. Two grey triangles, the Pyramides Calcaires, guarded its flanks like a castle wall and formed a barrier across the left-hand side of the valley below us.

This valley had a more alpine feel to the pastoral (and misnamed) Vallée des Glaciers that we’d just ascended, named after the peak above us rather than the ice sheets that it didn’t have. We were looking all the way down Val Veny into Italy, and up the curiously named Val Ferret to the Swiss border. I was glad to be returning to a country that conjured fond memories, even though we would be there for barely 48 hours.

The trail had been easy all the way up to Col de la Seigne (2,516m). It was only 10.45, but we still had a long way to go. We raced down the other side. The trail was smooth and firm, and the gradient was a comfortable angle for running. We passed a pair of crazy people coming up the other way on mountain bikes. They had almost reached the top of the pass and I was impressed to see that they were still pedalling. The going was easy for walkers, but not for cyclists. Based on my only experience of mountain biking I would have got off to push a few miles earlier, and by the top I would be resembling a snail, crawling up the hill on my hands and knees with the bike balanced on my back like a shell.

We passed the old customs house of La Casermetta, a rectangular stone building standing like a watchtower in the middle of a slope, and crossed a broad plain to reach Rifugio Elisabetta. This sumptuous lodge sits on a hillside just above the trail and is overlooked by the attractive double peak of Aiguille de Tré la Tête (3,930m). It’s the only accommodation in a long section of remote valley, and marks the end of the day’s walk for many people. It was only 11.30, but we were hotelling it and still had a long way to go. We were compressing two sections of guidebook into a single day, and had to reach Courmayeur before nightfall.

The land dropped steeply below Rifugio Elisabetta from the upper part of Val Veny, known as Vallon de la Lée Blanche, to a wetland plain called Lac Combal. The refuge was serviced by a dirt road that weaved up in long switchbacks. We descended the road till the first bend, then found a shortcut on a good unmarked path that left the road and dropped straight down to Lac Combal. At the bottom, we rejoined the road and crossed the plateau on a long, dead-straight section of road.

On one of my apps, this section was actually shown as a lake, but despite its name it was no such thing. The plateau was a weird wetland habitat of bubbling streams, tufted banks, weedy plants and the occasional small tree.

We passed a few people coming the other way. Now we were in Italy, I started saying buongiorno instead of bonjour (although it was now afternoon and if I really wanted to show off my Italian I should have been saying buon pomeriggio). Up ahead we could see a dramatic rock needle thrusting out of the mountainside to our left. This was the Aiguille Noire de Peuterey, the most notable feature of the Peuterey ridge, one of Mont Blanc’s most fearsome climbing routes. It wasn’t so much a gendarme as a fully armed policeman in riot gear. It was also one of the climbs that established the reputation of local boy Walter Bonatti, who made an ascent of a severe route on its west face in 1949 at the age of 19.

We reached the end of the plateau at about 12.15, just a few metres short of a bus stop. The route description in the pack from our agency suggested we might like to get a lift down to Courmayeur, But that would be like leaving the stadium before the winner is scored. Instead, we took the main TMB up the hillside to the right, for a spectacular afternoon of hiking. The trail climbed steeply above the valley floor. We ascended for about 15 minutes then stopped to have lunch on a grassy bank looking across to Mont Blanc. Edita sat down next to an ants’ nest. Luckily I noticed it before I sat down next to her – otherwise I would certainly have reached Courmayeur a couple of hours sooner, but then I wouldn’t have been able to sit down again until I’d sandblasted my anus in the hotel bathroom.

The next section of trail was sheer pleasure. We continued to climb for a few hundred metres through sparse forest into grassy moorland, then contoured hundreds of metres above the valley on a spectacular high trail. Looking across Val Veny, Mont Blanc remained wreathed in cloud and guarded by rocky pyramids, but a pair of elevated glaciers, the Glacier de Brouillard and Glacier de Frêney, formed entranceways into its upper reaches. Separating them was a black knife-edge of rock, the Innominata Ridge, another route for psychopaths. Meanwhile to the left of the summit, the much larger Glacier du Miage cut a deeper trench through the western arm of the massif.

There was a lot of climbing history oozing from the view before us, much of it connected with the great Italian climber Walter Bonatti. Born in Bergamo, beneath the foothills of the Italian Alps, in 1930, Bonatti learned to rock climb on the crags around Lake Como, and by his late teens was successfully climbing some of the most extreme routes in the Alps with his friend Andrea Oggioni including, as we have seen, the insane black needle of rock to our right. He returned every year and stayed at a campsite in the Val Ferret. In 1954 he became a guide and soon moved to Courmayeur, where he lived for ten years.

Somewhere in the clouds above the Glacier de Frêney was the Central Pillar of Frêney, where in 1961 Bonatti was involved in an epic tragedy. He and Oggioni were guiding a climber up the pillar when a summer storm struck. Faced with waiting out a storm which he knew might last for days or retreating, Bonatti chose the latter. They descended a spur with four French climbers who were attempting the route at the same time. Bonatti led the way through knee-deep snow in appalling weather, but four of the climbers died of exhaustion, including Oggioni. Only Bonatti, his client and one of the French climbers, Pierre Mazeaud, survived.

Turning away from this wall of ghosts, I looked up at our own side of the valley. On a shoulder of mountain high above us, a giant metal hut perched in an unlikely location atop a steep rocky spur. It was only when we got further round that we realised it was a cable car station serving the Courmayeur ski resort.

We followed this stupendous high trail for two or three kilometres, never tiring of the view on both sides. Shortly before 3pm, the path dropped back into pine forest to reach another refuge, the Rifugio Maison Vieille, in a forested col beneath a pointy Macchu Picchu-like peak called Mont Chétif (2,343m). Several groups of trekkers were sitting in a scenic garden outside the refuge drinking beer. It was tempting to stop ourselves, but we were still a few hundred metres above Courmayeur and alcohol would have made the final section a bit more of a slog.

Here the TMB left the Val Veny and diverted down to the right of Mont Chétif. A signpost said 1 hr 35 to Courmayeur, but on the downhill sections, we knew we were always quicker than the guidebooks. We could now see the town far below us. It seemed a long way down. The first part passed through the assorted infrastructure of the ski resort, mainly on roads or ski runs with cables passing overhead.

After what seemed like about 10 minutes of descending in this way (though it was probably longer), we passed a cable car station and the trail plunged into thick forest. I could see that it was going to be steep, knee-jarring stuff.

We had only descended a few metres when we passed two young Englishmen on the way up who asked us how far it was to the refuge. This is always an impossible question to answer on steep terrain when you’re going in opposite directions and have no idea how quick the other party is. I usually just default to ‘oh, keep going, you’re nearly there; just a couple of minutes.’

This time I laughed.

‘It’s an hour then,’ one of them said nervously.

‘Oh, no,’ I replied. ‘It’s only taken us about 10 minutes. So I guess it will take you about 20.’

‘But that man walking ahead of you said it’s an hour.’

I paused and shook my head. ‘No, it can’t be.’

‘Shall we say 40 minutes then?’ the other one replied.

I nodded. ‘One thing’s for sure: it’s somewhere between 20 minutes and an hour.’

We laughed and moved on.

Edita and I raced down through the forest, taking care not to trip on tree roots. The forest was so thick that we could no longer see the town below us. I was surprised when we suddenly emerged onto a road. There were houses just below us and a sign said only 15 minutes to Courmayeur. Edita looked up our hotel on the Maps.me app and we followed her directions through the village of Doloronne with its narrow alleyways, across the river and up into Courmayeur.

According to the guidebook, today was going to involve 9 hours of walking and we expected to arrive late. But we had arrived in Courmayeur at 4pm and it had taken us only 7 hours. But my joints were aching and tired from our long descent. My Italian deserted me when I approached reception in the Hotel Bouton d’Or, and I ended up speaking in English.

With two nights ahead of us in Courmayeur and a taxi ride back to the same hotel after the next day’s walk, we were happy to be given a nice big double room. Pleased with our day, we treated ourselves to a delicious rare steak with patate al forno and grilled vegetables and enjoyed the Italian vibe at restaurant La Terrazza.

Day 5 – Courmayeur to Arnouva

I was expecting a short day today. At the end, we had a 4pm rendezvous with a taxi at Arnouva in the Val Ferret to bring us back to Courmayeur. The charcuterie didn’t open until 8.30, so we took it easy in our room and departed soon after.

Before we left, Edita glanced at the guidebook and noticed a variant route to the main TMB that went up a ridge and over a peak. This route was two hours longer than the main one, and the timings both in the guidebook and on my app suggested that we hadn’t a hope of doing it and catching our taxi. Remembering our little argument at Col de Voza on the second day, when Edita was disappointed to take the easy route, I decided not to tell her about this one to avoid any discussion.

But now the cat was out of the bag.

‘Ha, you wanted to keep it a secret!’ she said with an evil laugh.

It was 9pm by the time we bought our supplies, made sandwiches and climbed the steps to the square at the top of the hill. The route passed to the right of the rather grand building of the Alpine Guides Society of Courmayeur and continued up a long, straight residential street to the top of the town.

We started out on our own, but by the time we reached the top, we found ourselves in a group of eight trekkers, each trying to outpace the others. Beyond the top of the town, the road became a trail and the TMB climbed in zigzags up a forested hillside.

One of the little known properties of busy trails is that they power you up the hill at roughly twice your normal pace. First, you have to walk a little faster to overtake. Then, once past, you have to keep going – no water breaks or stopping to remove a layer – lest the tortoises overtake you again and you get stuck behind. We raced up the steep hairpins of the forest trail like Max Verstappen starting from the back of the grid.

In almost no time, we burst out of the forest and arrived on a wide, grassy balcony overlooking Courmayeur. Across the valley, Mont Chétif looked even more like Macchu Picchu than Macchu Picchu. Two large groups were milling around and chatting, so we continued on. Just above, another fine refuge sat on an airy perch. I was astonished to discover that it was Rifugio Bertone. It wasn’t yet 10.30, which meant that we’d completed a two-hour climb in little more than an hour, and the day’s climbing was already over.

Or was it? 50m above the refuge we reached another promontory overlooking the junction of three valleys. Courmayeur lay at the top end of the Valle d’Aosta, after which Italy’s smallest and most north-westerly region is named. It was fed by the Val Veny that we’d followed from the French border in the west yesterday, and the Val Ferret that we would be following east towards Switzerland today. Above the bottom end of Val Veny, the vast Brenva Glacier spilled down almost vertically from an apron of cliffs surrounding the summit of Mont Blanc. The summit itself remained teasingly hidden behind a veil of clouds, but perhaps we’d get a peep later?

This wasn’t the only junction that we’d arrived at. A signpost pointed across the shoulder and down into forest above the Val Ferret. A protected area, according to the Italian Ministry of Tourism the Val Ferret is home to a profusion of wildlife: 81 bird species, including golden eagles, bearded vultures, red-crowned owls, ptarmigans, choughs, black grouse, black woodpeckers and red-backed shrikes, as well as chamois, roe deer, red deer, hares and marmots. Everything, it seems, except ferrets.

We could have headed downwards and gone wildlife spotting. But another sign pointed upwards onto a grassy ridge. We had reached the branch of Edita’s variant route and our thoughts naturally turned that way. Edita was keen to get away from the crowds (and given the choice of two routes, will always favour the harder one willy-nilly). I was more concerned with the fact that we were making such good time that we seemed certain to arrive at our rendezvous with the taxi hours ahead of schedule. Besides, Edita’s route up the ridge did look more inviting.

I got out the guidebook, compared the timings with those on the app, and cross-referenced both with the signpost, which conveniently gave distances not in kilometres but hours and minutes. The Cicerone guidebook said it would take 4½ hours to reach Rifugio Bonatti, then a further 1 hour 40 to Arnouva. It was 10.40, so this would put us at the rendezvous 50 minutes late.

The signpost, on the other hand, said 1 hour 45 to Col Sapin, which was 35 minutes quicker than the estimate in the guidebook. In fact, over the last couple of days, we’d made the guidebook’s times look childish. Yesterday we’d shaved two hours off, and I was confident that we could shave off 50 minutes more.

‘Let’s do it!’ I said.

‘Yay!’

‘But we can’t hang around.’

Edita shot off up the hill and I followed in her wake. Of the dozens of people arriving at the signpost, only one followed us up the high route. For the next hour, we didn’t see another soul. It was bliss, but it was tough. We plodded slowly up the grassy ridge, going at our own pace now that we didn’t have other people to overtake.

Before long, the ridge flattened out and curled to the right towards two modest grassy peaks. We could see the trail skirt underneath the first one, then up and over the second. The ridge was marked on the map as Mont de la Saxe, and the two peaks were Tête Bernarda (2,534m) and Tête de la Tronche (2,584m).

The terrain was a contrast to previous days: a gently rolling crest of calmness amid the chaos of snow-clad cliffs and spires. To our left across Val Ferret, the Mont Blanc massif had been wreathed in cloud. But Edita chanced to glance back at a moment when the veil parted. The sleeping giant emerged beyond the ridge we had just ascended. Mont Blanc from the Italian side bears no resemblance to the shining snow dome that is seen from Chamonix. The huge frozen river of the Brenva Glacier tumbled down before a trapezium of towering buttresses and icy couloirs.

We paused to enjoy the majesty of this fleeting glimpse before the curtain closed. Sure enough, within ten minutes the clouds lowered and the mountain disappeared, not to be seen again until four days later when we circled back to France.

We plodded upwards, past a herd of cows, then past a cow herder with a dog who was putting up fencing in this unlikely location (the herder, not the dog). A few plastic stakes and a narrow blue line no wider than the frail cord Whymper had used on the Matterhorn seemed enough to contain the herd.

The path steepened to pass beneath the first peak, then rose less steeply as it rejoined the ridge and curved up to the summit of Tête de la Tronche. We reached the top at 12.15 and enjoyed the view down to Courmayeur for one last time, framed on the right by the ridge we’d just climbed and Col de la Seigne on the horizon far behind. There was blue sky overhead, but to the north the Mont Blanc massif remained shrouded in a layer of cloud.

We descended a steep path down to Col Sapin on eroded scree, past a couple of dramatic pinnacles that I didn’t notice until I looked back at Tête de la Tronche later in the day. It took us only ten minutes from the summit to the 2,436m col. A guided group who passed us on the way up were the last people we saw until we rejoined the main trail.

We turned left past more cows and descend into the top end of a grassy combe. Signposting was poor and we started descending the combe into the valley below. Only after we’d dropped 50m past an abandoned shepherd’s hut did I glance at my app and realise we were descending the wrong valley. We had to climb back up and return to a branching trail that I’d missed on the way down.

This trail climbed inexorably for 300m up to another pass, almost as high as Tête de la Tronche, the peak we’d just crossed. We were racing against the clock, but as we plodded onwards and upwards, my pace became more laboured and I felt myself flagging. Something had to give. Before we reached the pass, I asked Edita to stop so that I could have some lunch and regain the energy that was rapidly dwindling. We sat on a grassy bank and gazed back across the combe to the silver dome of Tête de la Tronche with its two subsidiary pinnacles resting to the left of the summit like the knuckles of a fist.

We stopped for just 15 minutes, but it provided the energy boost I needed. We raced up and over the pass, Pas Entre Deux Saut (2,524m) and down into the next (correct) combe, the Vallon de Malatra. A vast grey scree slope, spilling down from a line of rock peaks, covered the upper reaches of the combe. These peaks were obscured by cloud and we were in too much of a hurry to stop and study them, but I discovered later that behind the highest, Grande Rochere (3,328m), lay the Great St. Bernard Pass.

Fortunately, the Vallon itself was broad and the terrain was easy. We descended rapidly across a moorland shelf that appeared to fall away suddenly into the Val Ferret somewhere in front of us. Across the valley, a mass of rocky needles thrust skywards into a bank of cloud. These dark pinnacles were encrusted with sheets of ice and tumbling glaciers. They formed the southern face of the Grandes Jorasses, one of the Mont Blanc massif’s most iconic mountains. On another day, the Vallon de Malatra must be the best of all viewpoints, but today we were denied that privilege.

We regained the main trail above Rifugio Bonatti (named, of course, after the great man) at 2.30. We now had views down into the valley that we were denied from high on the ridge. Clusters of chalets and campsites nestled among pine forest, and the road and river ran prominently along its base. Looking back from further along we could see all the way up the Val Veny to Col de la Seigne and the lower prongs of Aiguille des Glaciers. We had been setting a good pace to reach our rendezvous at Arnouva, and we now had 1½ hours to complete a journey the guidebook said would take 1 hour 40. A doddle, but just to be safe, we didn’t slow down.

We followed a high trail around the bottom edge of the Vallon de Malatra. We rounded a corner and looked up to the top end of the Val Ferret. The path contoured just above the forest line with pines to our left. Before long, we could see the car park at Arnouva directly below us, with its broad turning circle for buses. The trail continued well beyond it before doubling back to descend to the valley floor in a series of long and easy hairpins.

We reached the car park at 3.45, tired but satisfied. There must have been 40 to 50 people milling around hoping to catch the bus. Had we been doing likewise then I would have been worried about getting on. But we could relax. We had just sat down to finish our sandwiches when our driver Luca arrived in the taxi. We sat away from the crowds on a tree stump at the opposite side of the parking area, and he drove right up to us.

He opened the door and got out with a big grin on his face.

‘Mister ‘Orrell?’

‘Si, mi chiama Mark.’

He had been trying to call me throughout the day, but I had my phone on airplane mode to save battery for navigation.

It took just 20 minutes to drive back to Courmayeur, past the tourist resorts of the Val Ferret. The road was relatively flat, but it dropped steeply at the bottom end, down into the Val d’Aosta just above Courmayeur. We were back at 4.15, and had time to relax before dinner.

Day 6, part 1 – Arnouva to the Grand Col Ferret

Luca picked us up from the hotel at 8.30 and drove all the way back up the Val Ferret to drop us at Arnouva to resume our walk. Some people will call this cheating, but some people like to run up and down steep mountainsides in skin-tight lycra, carrying nothing more than a CamelBak. That’s OK too; there is room on the trail for all of us.

We were walking by 8.50. A wide track cut through forest before a narrower trail rose steeply in zigzags up a hillside. Once again, there were many people on the trail, and we overtook them one by one. We reached a herd of big brown cows with pointy horns blocking the path. They weren’t aggressive, but they showed no inclination to move out of our way; we had to weave around them, taking care not to be barged off the path or skewered like a sausage. After a steep climb of about 200m, the path flattened out and contoured more gradually up to Rifugio Elena, which perched on a promontory at the top end of the Val Ferret, overlooking a mass of moraine from a glacier.

Somewhere above in cloud was the glaciated Mont Dolent (3,823m), the most easterly peak of the Mont Blanc massif, which marked the border of all three of the TMB’s countries: France, Italy and Switzerland. We were about to cross over the Grand Col Ferret into the last of these. There were a number of candidates for this pass on the ridgeline ahead of us, but none of them looked very inviting. The most obvious notch immediately to the right of Mont Dolent looked impassable. This was, in fact, the Petit Col Ferret, a shortcut to today’s destination La Fouly if we fancied something a bit more challenging (we didn’t, or at least I didn’t).

We reached Rifugio Elena shortly after 9.30. A giant water fountain sprayed glacier water like a geyser across the path. We could now see figures high on a grassy hillside to the right on a much more feasible trail, and realised the Grand Col Ferret lay out of sight in this direction. Ahead of the crowds now, we were able to climb at our own steady pace. The trail rose in easy zigzags to reach a combe, then turned left to slant across a grassy hillside as it approached the col.

We reached the 2,537m Grand Col Ferret at 10.30 and turned to look back into the forested Italian Val Ferret for one last time. Although the day was sunny, the high peaks of the Mont Blanc massif, including the Grandes Jorasses and Mont Dolent, remained firmly in cloud.

Ahead of us, we looked down into another Val Ferret, the Swiss one. Although we were crossing a watershed, the valleys on either side bore the same name. Our return to Italy had been brief; we had been here for almost exactly two days. Now it was time to cross into another land.

The story continues in part 3 as we walk the Swiss section to the French border at Col de Balme.

To view all photos from our trek, see my Tour du Mont Blanc Flickr album.