Italy's Gran Paradiso, France's Vanoise

Europe’s largest wilderness area Is a grand mountain landscape

Although they’re only half as high as the Himalayas, the Alps are just as stunning visually. That’s because, like their Asian counterparts, the Alps erupt without prologue from the earth, sheer and soaring, the result of Africa’s relentless (though glacial) tectonic surge north, a movement that has pushed Italy smack into the European Plate and rather crumpled up the landscape in the process.

Even better, unlike the Himalayas, visitors to the Alps don’t have to trek over lonely distances to reach them. It doesn’t hurt, too, that the Alps run through some of the most advanced and civilized countries of the world – France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Austria. A network of superb roads and centuries-old habitations makes the mountains accessible and hospitable.

Nature itself has made the mountains surprisingly agreeable in summer. Even at altitudes of 12,000 and 13,000 feet, the Alps are mild enough to invite millions of hikers, climbers and trekkers every year to enjoy their scenery in relative comfort. That’s not to say that these mountains don’t take a toll of life every year – they do – but despite their size, steepness and high altitudes, they are among the safest big ranges on the planet.

Because they’ve been occupied for thousands of years, the Alps have no real wilderness areas, save for the parts that are too steep and cold for permanent settlements. (“Otzi,” the “Ice Man” whose mummified corpse was found in the Italian Alps in 1991, died around 3,300 B.C. His clothing and implements were highly refined, indicating that the people who lived in the Alps had found them to be quite a compatible home.)

Even as the Celts, Romans and Germans expanded the pressures humans placed on the alpine environment with farming, grazing, hunting, mining and logging, parts of the landscape escaped exploitation. The wealthy carved out estates and hunting preserves, and agricultural communities learned to set side forests and meadows to control erosion and insure steady supplies of fodder and building materials.

By the 19^th century, royal and aristocratic hunting preserves began taking on a more urgent purpose than mere set-asides for bored bluebloods: conservation. As guns came to be increasingly used by hunters, beginning in the 17^th century, species such as the alpine ibex faced extinction. In one example, by the early 19^th century in Italy’s northwestern Gran Paradiso Mountains, the population of the massively horned goat, which neolithic cave artists had portrayed over thousands of years, had been reduced to 100. Wisely, the Italians banned hunting of the ibex in 1823. In 1856, King Victor Emmanuel II extended that protection by creating the Gran Paradiso royal reserve. Now, with the full power of the monarch behind its preservation, the ibex enjoyed at least one refuge.

In 1922, Italy took a final step and declared Gran Paradiso the nation’s first national park. The 270-square-mile preserve adjoined the Vanoise Mountains of France’s Savoie, in the Rhône-Alpes, a region also noted for its population of ibex and chamois. Noting that the contiguous regions mirrored each other in many ways, French alpinists, hikers and conservationists began advocating that France create a national park system that would give legal protection to the flora and fauna of the Vanoise.

France finally established a national park system in 1963, fittingly enough by making the Vanoise its first park, setting aside a 205-square-mile zone of protection against hunting and logging. Together with Gran Paradiso, the resulting wild area, almost 500 square miles in extent, was the largest in Western Europe and remains so to this day. (The two parks’ combined area is about half the size of Yosemite National Park in California.) Today, about 1,500 ibex thrive in the two protected areas.

What the French and Italians have set aside in their two preserves is a massive, post-glacial mountain landscape, beginning at 2,500 feet above sea level and soaring in places to glacier-topped, 13,000-foot peaks. The Vanoise, in particular, is distinguished by numerous valleys, accessed by wide passes, that invite hiking. Despite their size and height, the Vanoise are surprisingly mild climatically. Adjacent mountain ranges form a barrier to precipitation, resulting in a relatively dry, sunny summer landscape.

Wisely, both Italy and France acknowledge that humans are part of the natural landscape. Even as the ibex and chamois, as well as hundreds of plant species are protected by virtual wilderness areas in the parks’ interiors, human ecology is protected, too. In the Vanoise, ancient beech-fir forests are interspersed with hay fields that farmers created hundreds and thousands of years ago as sources of food for their livestock. Though human activity deforested parts of the mountains, the succeeding hay fields over the years have come to shelter numerous plant and animal species that thrive in an open countryside.

In the two major valleys of the park, the Maurienne and the Tarentaise, farmers still follow ancient shepherding practices, all aimed at the production of cheese and wool, the area’s traditional economic mainstays.  In Gran Paradiso, the shepherding tradition continues, too. There, the Italian authorities encourage the locals to continue their centuries-old agricultural pursuits. One of cleverest of their customs is the construction of three-story stone and wood houses that stay warm in winter by sandwiching the farmers on the second floor, between the body heat rising from their livestock on the first, and the insulating cap of hay stashed on the third.

Both parks features a series of “refuges,” which is their nomenclature for high-country inns or shelters where hikers can eat and sleep after a day’s trekking. Some of those are quite sophisticated, offering delicious meals and very comfortable lodging.

Those who have seen the Alps take away memories of vast, steep masses that form one of the most dramatic backdrops to human existence to be found anywhere on earth. It is gratifying to see that two nations have been willing to set aside a significant portion of their own alpine landscapes to preserve both endangered animals and plants, as well as the human members of the local ecology, and to make them accessible to anybody who likes to walk.

– Patrick Totty