June 13th. Gran Paradiso, North Face – 4,061 m, D grade, over 55°, a 600 m ice wall at the top of the 1,300 m summit push. Solo.
I’d been putting this one off, if I’m honest. The normal route to Gran Paradiso is popular enough to feel like a queue most days, and it never held much appeal for me. The North Face was the version of the mountain I actually wanted – steep classical snow and ice, the kind of climb where the mountain decides how the day goes, not you.
The first good weather window of the season sent me driving to Pravieux after work, then fast-hiking the 900 m up to Rifugio Chabod, where the staff scraped together a last-minute bed for me. Dinner didn’t last long before a helicopter pulled everyone’s attention outside. Three people hadn’t come back from the North Face. Search and rescue worked it in stages through the evening, and by the time it was over, they’d pulled three bodies out of the lower crevasse.
That’s not something you unsee the night before you’re due to climb the same wall.
I had real doubts sitting with that. The hut owner mentioned two French climbers had done the route the day before and called conditions normal – which was something, but not much, since nobody else at the hut was even attempting the face the next day. No one to compare notes with, no one to talk myself into or out of it with. I sat with the doubt for a while and landed somewhere honest: whatever happened to those three people involved a chain of things I couldn’t see from where I was standing, and I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. What I could control was how careful I was willing to be, and having a way out if I needed one – worst case, a series of Abalakov anchors to self-belay down. I went to sleep with that plan in my head, such as sleep happened at all.
At 3:30 a freezing shower and breakfast got me moving by 5 a.m. The approach was easy by comparison – 700 vertical meters to the base of the wall, nothing technical about it – and I reached the ice around 7. Getting to the wall itself meant working around the lower crevasse, the same one they’d pulled the bodies from the night before, then crossing the upper bergschrund on a bridge that was thankfully still intact through the middle. Scattered across the base of the face was gear that had belonged to the three climbers. Hearing about a tragedy is one thing. Climbing past what it left behind is another.
Fifty meters of solid neve above the bergschrund turned out to be the only enjoyable stretch of the entire wall. After that, the ice just fell apart under me.
Some of it was porous, almost like frozen sorbet – I’d strike a pick in and instead of holding, it would scatter into a spray of icicles. Other sections looked like real waterfall ice but were brittle underneath, unstable in a way that didn’t show until you committed to it. I placed a 22 cm ice screw at one point to anchor myself and rest for a few minutes, and it didn’t feel trustworthy – the whole block of ice it sat in seemed to be shifting under load. My crampon frontpoints were holding on faith more than anything the ice was actually giving me.
Around a quarter way up I found a frozen-in ice axe. The German pair climbing behind me found a second one further down. This was almost certainly where it happened to the three climbers the day before, and knowing that didn’t make the ice any easier to trust.
I’d planned a straight line up the middle of the face. The ice took that decision away from me, so I started angling left toward the rocks instead – a traverse that cost real energy but eventually got me somewhere solid enough to sit, eat something, bandage a knee that had started bleeding, and actually rest for a minute. The whole way across I kept running the same calculation: could I keep making this move safely, and it mostly came down to how much strength I had left rather than anything technical. Knowing I could bail if the answer turned out to be no made it easier to answer that question honestly instead of talking myself past it.
The ice on the rock side wasn’t easy – maybe 10% better than before – but it let me move faster than I had all morning. Even with that, the wall took close to five hours against an estimated three.
Standing at the top of the face, it took a while just to remember how to walk upright again. Above it, a series of snow and rock ridges led toward the peak, and what should have been the easy part of the day wasn’t, because my legs were mostly finished by then. I moved slowly, thinking about balance more than progress.
From there it was a scramble to the true summit – 4,061 m, and the views were genuinely something. But if I’m honest, the North Face had been the point of the day, and it still had my attention even after I’d finished it. A short rope-assisted descent, a scramble up a second pile of rocks to the Madonna statue at the top – none of it registered as climbing anymore. In my head, everything past the wall was just the way home.
The way home turned into its own fight. Midday sun had softened the snow to slush, and every few steps I’d sink in waist-deep with no idea what was underneath. My legs were done, and it still took almost four hours to get back to Rifugio Chabod, where the staff met me with a warmth I genuinely needed by that point. A fast freezing shower, an espresso, and I told the small group planning the North Face for the next morning exactly what I’d found up there – and told them clearly not to go.
The worst part came on the walk down to the car. Looking back at the face, there were still people on it – only halfway up, having started thirty minutes behind me.
I hope they made it.