Gran Paradiso Tour

Italy is not just good food and beautiful cities.

If you like trekking there are a lot of gorgeous places and natural areas.

One of them is the Gran Paradiso National Park.

Gran Paradiso 

This is the most ancient italian national park and it is located in the North-West of Italy.
There you can have a good time hiking through the italian Alps: you can visit all the Gran Paradiso National Park's valleys by foot thanks to a wide network of footpaths!

Here you can see some photos I took last year during a week spent from Valsavaranche to the Orco valley, walking through the Nivolet plateau.

Valsavaranche

You can visit the Valsavarenche valley for one or more of days: there are a lot of tracks and an interesting Park's wolves and other predators visitor center (http://www.pngp.it/en/visit-park/visitor-centres/precious-predators).

If you want to see the Gran Paradiso, the only 4K mountain entirely within italian territory, you can take the track for Rifugio Vittorio Emanuele II.

This is the Gran Paradiso from Rifugio Vittorio Emanuele II.

Valsavarenche - Col du Nivolet

It will take 3HH by foot.

Valsavarenche - Croce di Arolley (1H)

You can move by foot from Valsavarenche to the col du Nivolet taking the track for Croce di Arolley (1H). This Valsavaranche panorama was taken from the Croce di Arolley.

Croce di Arolley - Col du Nivolet (2HH)

Once reached the Croce of Arolley, you are on a beautiful 2.5K altitude plateau. It will take a couple of hours to reach the Col du Nivolet.

This is one of the italian areas with the darkest nights, you can see a lot of stars.

It's not hard to see a lot of wild animals (for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpine_ibex, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupicapra and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marmot).

A funny marmot on the path:

Col du Nivolet

Near the col du Nivolet mountain pass there are two mountain huts: you can stay there for a couple of days or more if you want to have a rest or visit other tracks.

From there you can see a lot of alpine lakes and take a lot of footpaths (for example: col Rosset, col Leynir).

Here you can see some pictures from col du Nivolet at sunset:

Col du Nivolet - Orco valley

Time to move from col du Nivolet for Chiapili di sotto or Ceresole Reale.

This is a shoot from the old track:

This was the location of several scenes in the film The italian job (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Italian_Job).

Do you see the Ceresole's lake over there? This is the final destination of the walk.

Photos

Do you like this place? See my Gran Paradiso album
and visit http://www.pngp.it

Cartography

Carta dei sentieri 1:25000 number 14 "Valle dell'Orco Gran Paradiso" L'ESCURSIONISTA & MONTI editori