Italian Alps – day 4

Bivacco Greppi Emilio – Aleccio

10.7.2024 Wednesday

→ 24,9 km ↑ 1699 m – total 83 km

A light show woke me up in the night. There was a storm somewhere in the distance, and it was lightning up practically every second. In a panic I woke Jozef up. But we couldn’t hear any thunder. I pulled buff over my eyes and tried to sleep through it. I also woke up after 4am, before sunrise, but just peeked out of the tent at the colored sky and went back to sleep. Alarm’s at 6:30am.

Today we’ve got a lot of kilometers ahead of us. Breakfast is mushroom soup with dry Italian bread, then coffee, a croissant, we pack up and set off. Right at the start we’ve got a pleasant climb to Bocchetta di Ruggia pass. We finally see our first marmot! It’s a nice trail, fairly flat, over rocks.

We go around a farm with a flyer posted about how to behave around dogs, and we spot 2 hikers camping nearby. I’m not feeling entirely comfortable. I thought I could hold it, but I can’t. I go dig my first hole. Ah, instantly better. We head down to Alpe Camana, where there’s another locked shelter. The trail continues alongside a stream, but right at the start we hit a problem. There’s about 2 meters of snow there. We look for a way around, but there’s a steep drop on every side. So we put on our crampons and cross straight through.

There’s a stream underneath it, so we go carefully, since there might be a thin layer of snow over it. We manage it, and from there a nice trail continues. We descend to about 1600 m. There are a lot of anthills, so I move fast. We reach the Torrente Isorno river, which needs fording. We take off our shoes and socks, so we don’t have wet feet all day again. It’s icy, but manageable.

And we’re climbing again, 430 meters over 3 km, up to the Alpe Cavegna shelter. My energy’s running low, so I need a bongo energy bar, but at least there are beautiful views around us.

We reach Rifugio Primo Bonasson. Some guys are doing repairs there, probably not open to the public anymore. They ask if we need water and where we’re heading. I can’t really tell him that, but there’s only one way up from here, to Lago Gelato. I also ask about snow conditions, and he says there’s a bit of snow, mostly on the north side, so we’ll see.

The shelter’s just a bit higher up, and we take a lunch break there, bread with salami. There’s a water trough too, but no water’s flowing. The shelter’s pretty spooky. It’s genuinely cold inside, dark, and the roof’s made of flat stones. We don’t linger. Fueled up, we climb to Bocchetta di Lago Gelato pass (2434 m), 400 meters over 1.6 km. There’s not much of a trail, we look for painted markers and navigate with mapy.cz. On the south side we already hit a snowfield. We put on crampons and cross it without issue.

Then we can’t find the marker, so we go straight up diagonally, almost vertical, and then rejoin the trail. It’s a real grind. A herd of ibex watches us from the opposite hill. On the other side there’s a continuous layer of snow. The lake has a fitting name, “Gelato” (frozen).

We don’t know how to get down. It’s pretty steep and our small crampons aren’t enough for it. Slipping could be dangerous because of the lake below us. We choose a gentle descent along the contour line. Of all days, we don’t have GPS on our watches today, exactly when we’d need it most. We keep pulling out the phone and checking the route. There are snowfields lower down too, but they’re manageable to go around now. It was pretty exhausting. When I think about how the TMR has at least three passes at 2800 m, we conclude we simply can’t do it this year. If we can’t do it properly, we’d rather choose a different route. On the way to Bivacco A. Sironi we think about our next steps.

Of course we keep losing the trail, since nobody walks here. It gets better once we reach the settlement of houses still maintained by someone. Totally exhausted, we reach the shelter. Neither of us feels like continuing. Jozef’s happy to find there’s a flush toilet there. We eat and try to find the motivation for more kilometers. We pull ourselves together and climb again to Passo della Forcoletta pass. It goes fairly well. From up top we get a view over Lago di Matogno, which would make a lovely spot to camp.

This pass faces east/west, so there’s only a bit of snow left now. Interestingly, on the east side visibility’s excellent, and on the west side it’s completely white.

Now for the worse part. It’s 8.7 km down to the village of Crodo, with over 1800 meters of descent. To the settlement of Aleccio above Crodo it’s 3.7 km, so we set that as our goal for now and we’ll see from there. Going down there’s a lovely built trail, probably from when people still lived up here.

When our motivation dips we have a bompar candy. Jozef explains to me how to calculate average gradient, since I’d wanted to include that here and hadn’t figured out how. It’s really simple, for example, if there are 10 meters of elevation over 100 meters of distance, that’s a 10% gradient. So you just need to scale it to 100 m and divide. We’ve got 8700 m /100 = 87, and then 1800/87 = 20.69%, which is our average descent gradient. We try to move as fast as possible, since we can see some dark rain clouds ahead of us. We pass a herd of cows, we’re back in civilization now, we make it to Aleccio in time.

Both our legs are in pretty bad shape by now, and it starts drizzling. There’s a flat area here, water, and a shelter, near some community center. A real downpour starts, so I catch up on the blog under the shelter roof. Once the rain stops we do a bit of a wash, pitch the tent, and dinner is, firstly, pasta with sugo and parmesan, then mashed potato with tuna. After the rain the sky cleared up and we’ve got a beautiful view. Tomorrow we just need to push on to Crodo and move somewhere else.