Gran Paradiso – The Alps

Our journey to Gran Paradiso (13323 ft / 4061 m) was met with persistent reluctance due to unstable and unpredictable weather patterns around the Alps. We had conflicting reports of snow in Italy, but we all decided that the worst that could happen was that we’d find some spectacular food. I mean, it is Italy after all, and the rest stop just on the Italian side of the Mont Blanc tunnel easily served the best coffee we had on the trip. Thus no matter the weather, we were going to have fun.

Joining us on this leg of the journey was Caroline George and Matt Helliker along with Zoe. Gran Paradiso is a pretty benign climb, but yet it still has the traditional alpine elements of the Alps. Our summit attempt would be made from a hut that we would hike up to the first day. And true to form, the food at the hut was spectacular. We drank amazing Barbaroso wine (the attendants would pour us 1 L carafes for only 8 Euros), had incredible cappuccinos (1/2 the cost for a coffee in Chamonix – 1.5 Euros) , and even had our own sleeping quarters. I love climbing in Italy.

The next morning we work up at 5:00 am, ate breakfast, and then proceeded to hike through the snow to the summit. The sky was clear and the weather held out for us. Whew. The slog to the summit was uneventful, because our guides again had a brilliant strategy. We would wait 1 hours for the slower, bigger teams to break trail, and we would utilize their newly carved trail to climb up the mountain quite quickly. This would enable us to move swiftly past all the teams and forgo the eventual bottleneck of climbers vying to stand on the tiny summit.

As we moved ahead, the nasty bug that Brooks caught earlier in the week came back to bite him and thus Zoe and he back headed down to the hut. Our new guides, along with Armand and myself cruised past all the teams to the summit. It only took us 4 hours to reach the top of Gran Paradiso. The summit required a tiny bit of rope work, but it was child’s play compared to what we were doing the last week. Our team was the third one on the summit that day.

As we headed down, we noticed the stream of approximately 50 climbers waiting for their turn on the summit. Thankfully, we didn’t have to wait for them and boogied all the way back down to the hut. My team was the first to back to the hut, completing the round trip in 6 hours. All that acclimatizing paid off in spades. Photos from Gran Paradiso can be found Flickr.

When we returned to the bottom of the mountain, we found out that Peter’s summit attempt was cancelled due to the massive amount of snow still found on Mont Blanc. He apparently still had a great day of climbing in the snow, but no summit attempt was possible.

With this mountain, we ended our two weeks of climbing and European Climb For Kids event. We all had a blast and raised a ton of money for families in need. It was a magnificent way to help others and have fun doing it.

We want to give a special thanks to all of our guides for dealing with 4 very diverse personalities and helping of us reach our personal goals. We also want to give an extra special thanks to Zoe Hart we for leading our team and spending the massive amount of time organizing and planning this crazy itinerary.

NOTE: Photos from Zermatt can be found on Flickr. These photos are from all the participants and retain all the rights entitled to each person. No photo may be reproduced without the permission of Climb For Kids or the original photographer.