It’s time to take the ibex by the horns

The seasons switch rapidly in northern Italy. In spring, the dirty white of melting snow and parched brown of desiccated foliage turns to emerald green with staccato bursts of pink fruit blossom, yellow cowslips and violet alpine flowers. Over the summer, the greens will pale, before autumn’s mustards and russets erupt, a last riot before the long winter. It is a cycle played out in Italy’s hills from the Val di Susa to Udine, but nowhere is it more marked than in the Parco Nazionale del Gran Paradiso.

Our walk starts gently enough in Cogne. This alpine village first found prosperity seven centuries ago with magnetite (iron ore) mining, an industry that once supported more than 20,000 Valdostans in the valley below. It is still possible to hike up to the original Colonna mine at 2,300m. Cogne’s church has a handsome bell tower and the village is justly famous for lace-making in the Venetian style al tombolo (literally, “on the drum”) and wood carving, although most of the visitors come for outdoor pursuits .

In winter, Cogne is the best spot in the Valle d’Aosta for cross-country skiing, and was reputedly in the running to host the event for the Turin 2006 Winter Olympics. In the summer, it is a gateway to the Gran Paradiso for thousands of hikers and climbers – too many thousands in mid-August. But the rest of the year it is just perfect.

From Cogne, our springtime walk crosses the meadows of Sant’Orso, still scarred from ski tracks. We pass four men slowly, ever so slowly, removing a giant sign that reads “Cogne Snow Park”, before rising sharply to enter a narrow gorge that marks the entrance to the national park. We continue through pine glades, the icy blue-green Torrente Valnontey gushing along our left and sheer granite cliffs and scree to the right, before opening out 40 uphill minutes later into the unmistakable U-shape of a deep glacial valley.

This is Valnontey – village, valley and river share the name – and the last populated stop before emptiness. Though in early spring it hardly looks populated at all. A few hotels (seemingly closed), one bar (open, empty) and a pasture strewn with tens of thousands of wild crocuses later and we’re into the wilderness.

It was the fate of one animal that brought about the opening of this, Italy’s first national park, in December 1922: the ibex, known here as lo stambecco. The park’s original 5,000 acres were hunting grounds belonging to the royal house of Savoy. Faced with local pressure and a tumbling ibex population, King Vittorio Emmanuele III donated his private reserve for the preservation of flora, fauna and natural beauty.

Today, the park is more than 170,000 acres, with 500 miles of marked trails, 11 refuges and more high pastures, scalable peaks and passes, larch and pine forests and cavernous valleys than any one person could use in a week of walking. There’s even an alpine botanical garden (in Valnontey) housing more than 2,000 rare and common, native and foreign species (open June to September). Most importantly, the park is also home to more than 3,000 stambecchi (up from 416 since the Second World War) – and though that’s almost 60 acres for every ibex, we’re apparently in with a reasonable chance of glimpsing Europe’s largest alpine animal.

Beyond Valnontey, the path meanders along the valley floor. There are Olympian views of towering grey granite and moraine slopes and dirty glacial snouts. Right ahead of us stands the Gran Paradiso that gave the park its name, the only 4,000m mountain entirely in Italy; Mont Blanc, the Matterhorn and Monte Rosa are shared with France and Switzerland.

At least, the mountain was there last year. The weather up ahead is foul and all I can see is a menacing sky obscuring my favourite view in the park, if not in the entire Alps. But it is a straight swap, seasonality for silence, with inescapable logic: I can always buy a raincoat, but unfortunately cannot shoot noisy walkers to shut them up.

The only disadvantage to solitude is that so far we’ve seen no one to ask for directions to the nearest stambecco. But as it turns out we don’t need them – the ibex have found us. Four of them are standing by the banks of the torrente chomping away on some unappetising scrub and a few new shoots. Their spring coats are variegated gold and brown and their curved, outsized horns, ridged like the hump on a stegosaurus, look slightly comical, perhaps borrowed or stolen from an animal twice their size. And, boy, are these goats big – more like large deer or antelope, and totally untroubled by our presence.

We continue through the apparently abandoned timber settlement of Valmianaz, clocking up our fourth giant wooden crucifix of the day, and pick our way through the shadows and the run-off cast downhill by the Patry and Valletaz glaciers. But the snow lying around is getting deeper, the path more impassable and without snowshoes, a lot less fun. Clearly, it is time to turn back. We didn’t quite reach the head of the valley, not this time anyway. My cherished view of Italy’s beautiful mountain has remained obscured, stubbornly, all day long. But as well as the ibex, I’ve seen a dozen or so chamois and only one other person since breakfast.

The only sounds have been birds chirping and twittering in the pines, waterfalls plunging towards the valley floor and the ripping of melt-water down a swollen river.

And the smell? It smells of pine straw and marmot droppings and slowly melting ice, but most of all it smells of nothing at all, the best smell in the world.

Why doesn’t everyone come to the Alps out of season?

GIVE ME THE FACTS

How to get there

British Airways (0870 8509850; www.ba.com) flies from London Gatwick to Turin from £78 return and Ryanair (0871 2460000; www.ryanair.com) offers return flights from London Stansted from around £60. New budget airline EUJet (0870 4141414; www.eujet.com) will fly there at weekends from Manston in Kent from 18 December. Two daily buses serve Aosta from Turin Caselle airport; the fare is €6.20 (£4.20) one way. Trains run almost hourly from Turin’s Porta Nuova station from €6.80 (£4.60) one way (www.trenitalia.it). There are six daily buses from Aosta to Cogne costing around €2.30 (£1.60) one way.

Where to stay

Accommodation can be booked through the tourist offices at Cogne (00 39 0165 74040; www.cogne.org) and Gran Paradiso (00 39 0165 95055; www.granparadiso.net). The Vittorio Sella refuge, for example, costs from €13.70 (£9.30) for b&b in a dorm.

Further information

IGC 1:25,000 Map 101: Gran Paradiso, La Grivola, Cogne (£8.95) is available from Stanfords (020-7 836 1321; www.stanfords.co.uk). For invaluable assistance in planning walking itineraries see www.parks.it and www.pngp.it/eng/index.htm.

First published in the Independent.