Across the Alps with a six-year-old

Just before 9am, we clattered into the cable car in the Italian resort of Cervinia. The kids, eight and six, were in a state of high excitement — they’d been on ski lifts before but never in the middle of summer. My girlfriend and I were excited too: after long motorway miles in the midst of a European heatwave, we were about to be whisked upwards, to cool air and lofty horizons.

To be honest, I was also nervous. Ahead was a 50km trans-Alpine tour, through four valleys, crossing between two Italian provinces and over mountain passes up to 2,981m above sea level. We didn’t have a guide, just a compass, map and a hunch: that while kids moan about walking the moment the path tips uphill, they will happily go downhill for hours on end.

Only a minority of ski lifts run in summer, but it is becoming more common as resorts facing up to climate change try to diversify away from winter sports towards bikers, hikers and sightseers. Our plan was to use the lifts to shortcut as much as possible of the uphill, then to cross each day over a mountain pass and make a long descent into a new valley, where we would stay the night. In this way we would leapfrog between the valleys that run off like the spokes of a wheel from the south side of Monte Rosa, the Alps’ biggest massif, with 10 summits above 4,000m.

The uphill/downhill thing seemed to work on our occasional walks in the Surrey Hills, mere pimples to the south-west of London. Would it translate to Monte Rosa, which Leonardo da Vinci thought “so high that it seems almost to overtake the clouds”?

Within minutes of the cable car opening its doors, the first part of my hunch was confirmed. The lift deposited us at 2,814m; we had another 167m of uphill to get to the pass. “Hiking stinks,” said Hamish, six. The scenery didn’t help: we were in a grey world of scree and gravel, walking straight up the side of a wide, snowless ski piste. Bulldozers were working on levelling the ground nearby for some new bit of resort infrastructure; dumper trucks thundered past. Half an hour in, we were already reaching for the Haribo to encourage/bribe the kids.

Progress was painfully slow, the itinerary ahead looking wildly overambitious. As the kids stopped to play in a patch of gritty old snow, my thoughts turned to the rope I’d packed for last-resort child-dragging; for now it stayed in my pack.

Though we would rely on the lifts for the uphills, thankfully our downhill walking routes would take us well away from them. As we reached the pass, the Colle Superiore delle Cime Bianche, everything changed. Crossing beyond the edge of the ski area, past snow-making machines and a depot of assorted spare parts, we instantly moved into a gentler world: a little winding footpath, clumps of purple saxifrage beside it, and glimpses of a lake far below.

As the path went downhill, the kids were transformed too — suddenly forgetting to moan and skipping ahead. Forty minutes later we were at the lakeside, jumping out over stepping stones to reach a flat-topped boulder where we would have our picnic. All around the lake were rock walls, on one side topped with the gleaming white glacier from which the water surrounding us had melted. And even though it was August, we had this natural amphitheatre all to ourselves, a private redoubt hidden away right in the heart of Europe.

That sense of being sequestered — beyond the extremes of summer heat, the excesses of mass tourism, the sight or sound of roads, at times even the modern world — kept returning over the coming days, a fantasy of course, but a blissful one. That afternoon was a long steady downhill following a stream across golden grass-covered slopes, occasionally stopping to watch marmots scurry to their burrows.

Meadows like this, where cattle, sheep and goats are brought to graze in summer, are the essence of these mountains: an “alp” or “alpe” (or “Alm” in German) is a high pasture, often concealed on a mountain shelf or shoulder above the tree line and so invisible from the valley floor. We passed a couple of ruined farmhouses at Alpe Mase, then later a shepherd taking a nap in the long grass with his dog — safe in the knowledge that his job isn’t going to be stolen by AI anytime soon.

Finally, we made it down into the forest of larch and pine, and to Fiery, the first hamlet of the day. It has no roads and only four buildings, one of which had a piece of brown paper taped to the wall, a handwritten menu offering gnocchi, polenta, Fontina cheese crêpes and “km 0” yoghurt and milk.

Inside, the café had one higgledy-piggledy room, with cowbells hanging from rafters, shelves crammed with mountaineering books and an old photo on the wall of someone meeting a pope. There were no seats, instead people sat on wooden chairs outside or on a little terrace looking out over the forested flanks of the Val d’Ayas. There was only another half-hour of walking to reach the roadhead at Saint Jacques, so we ordered beer and ice cream, toasting the longest walk of the kids’ lives: 13km and a descent of almost 1,300m.

A hike like this in many parts of the world would require camping, and thus carrying big heavy packs. In the Alps you are spoilt for accommodation options, from basic climbers’ rifugios high on the mountainside to smart hotels down in the valley and much in between. That first night we stayed at Aethos Monterosa (at the time known by its former name, Camp Zero), just up from the pretty village, and winter ski resort, of Champoluc.

Opened in 2018, it was the village’s first five-star, but rather than being centred on a grand lobby or restaurant, the hotel is built around a vast indoor climbing wall. There are all the trappings of luxury — hot tubs, fluffy robes, five types of croissant on the breakfast buffet — but a sporty ethos pervades the whole place: even the bracelets for sale in a little vitrine by the reception are made from climbing rope, with miniature ice axes for clasps.

We had a rest day in Champoluc, then set off again early the following morning. Two gondola lifts saved us 855m of ascent, leaving only 350m to reach our next objective, the Col Pinter, gateway to the Valle di Gressoney. For an hour or so, the path traced the contour of the mountainside, a sizeable drop sloping away to the right. Alone, I wouldn’t have thought much about it, but holding my son’s hand, trying to stop him constantly bending down to pick up rocks or chase crickets, was a different matter. When we got beyond that steep section, I was mentally strung out, hands clammy, the world spinning slightly. I realised then that while bringing kids into the mountains forces you to lower your ambitions in terms of routes and distances, it can drastically amplify the adrenalin.

The footpaths we were following up and over the ridges were not built for tourists, but have connected these remote valleys for centuries. Most of our route was on the Great Walser Trail, which commemorates the waves of immigration of the Walser people between the 12th and 15th centuries. They came from the Rhône valley in Switzerland — today’s Valais canton — climbing over the high passes to start new lives south of Monte Rosa. No one knows exactly why they moved; most think it was simply the result of pressure on resources and lack of land. The valleys they reached were already populated but the Walsers were permitted to farm unused and isolated high-mountain plots in return for a cut of whatever they managed to produce.

After a picnic on the Col Pinter, we began descending to one of the Walser’s little homesteads. Alpenzu is a tight cluster of chalets and a whitewashed chapel built on a natural balcony overlooking the Valle di Gressoney. It was settled around 1200, but most of the surviving buildings date from the 17th century. At its heart, spread across three chalets, is a little rifugio, with a cosy wooden dining room, a few wooden tables set on timeworn stones in the courtyard outside, and a patch of grass under a big broadleaved tree, like a miniature village green halfway up the mountain.

For the Walsers, life must have been hard and lonely up here. At first, they slept on the ground floor of the chalets with their animals for warmth, one stall for the family, one for livestock, with often only a thin wooden fence between them. The upper floor was reserved for grain to be stored, dried and threshed. Gradually, the chalets were enlarged, separate granaries built, and the humans moved upstairs. They seemed to have resisted integration with the existing communities, though, maintaining their own Germanic language.

For us, staying at Alpenzu was to relish again that feeling of being at one remove from the world. Standing by the chapel, I could see car headlights on the road far below; looking up, I could see the snows of Monte Rosa turning pink in the evening light. It helps that this isn’t a basic climbers’ refuge — you can choose a private bedroom rather than a dormitory (ours was en suite), a three-course dinner is included in the very reasonable rate (€65 per person per night) and, this being Italy, there is great wine, coffee and cakes.

Some of the larch trees we passed on the steep descent to the Gressoney valley floor the next morning were more than 500 years old, their trunks 5m in circumference. But back in civilisation, things started to unravel. The driver of the bus we had planned to catch to the next set of ski lifts refused to let us on without face masks (in the end I had to run a couple of kilometres to the nearest town to buy some).

Storms were forecast for the afternoon. Lightning on exposed slopes above the tree line can be dangerous, and my anxiety was rising as we waited for the next bus — we’d lost more than two hours. By the time we’d ridden the lifts into the Sesia Valley, passing from the province of Aosta to Piedmont and from the Gressoney ski area to Alagna, it was 2pm. Ahead was our final and longest uphill — 370m from Alpe Pianalunga to the pass at Bocchetta delle Pisse. By now the kids were tired. The sweets came out. So did the rope.

At the top it was 4pm. The clouds were darkening but I was struggling to convey any sense of urgency to the rest of the family, who insisted on stripping off to swim in a small lake at the pass. We had an 820m descent ahead to the Rifugio Pastore, about 5km away, down a remote side-valley the guidebook called “wild and exciting”. I was growing tenser by the minute as we set off downhill at 4.30pm.

Quickly we came to a steep section where we had to clamber over scree; there was a fixed rope to help with some of it. Right on time, the rain started. We put on coats. The kids wanted to stop for food; I handed out sandwiches and exhorted rapid chewing. I scanned the clouds for signs of lightning, picturing headlines about foolhardy British tourists and irresponsible parents.

The rain got worse. Heidi, eight, seemed to find some sort of storm energy and began running down the path, towards who knows what precipice ahead. Hamish’s coat started to leak; I gave him mine. As I was fumbling with the zip, a cow with big horns appeared out of the mist, barrelling down the path and forcing us to leap out of the way. “Why have we come on this holiday?” sobbed Hamish.

We reached the flat pasture of Alpe Bors, where the streams had burst their banks and the path was several inches under water. We sploshed on, thunder rumbling in the distance. Gemma, my girlfriend, came up with the morale-raising wheeze of allowing the children to shout whatever swear words they liked at the tops of their voices.

It was 7pm, and the storm was finally fading, when we emerged from the forest to see the Rifugio Pastore, a huddle of wood-and-stone buildings in a meadow beside a stream. After hours of tension and uncertainty, and having not seen another human for five hours, I pulled open the door to find check-shirted waiters spinning about busy tables with plates of cheese and ham, bottles of red wine, bowls of deer stew and rabbit ragù.

Our little hike might have been modest — not to mention highly lift-assisted — but sitting down at a table in the warmth, the family safe and happy, supper on its way, was a moment to cherish. It had been a real adventure.

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