In June and July 2022, I hiked 410 miles on the Grande Traversata delle Alpi in northwestern Italy, over 5 weeks and 5 days.  The GTA is the most elevation I have gained and lost on any long trail or route I have ever hiked.  Over this time, I gained about 150,000 feet in elevation.  For reference, the entire Appalachian trail gains only about 230,000 feet over its entire 2,187 mile length.  The Appalachian Trail has the most elevation gain/loss out of the American Triple Crown trails (AT, PCT, CDT.).   That being said, this was a spectacularly beautiful and rewarding hike that is well-suited for many, many long-distance hikers.  I would highly recommend this trail to anyone who is prepared fitness-wise, which I’ll discuss in more detail below.   NOTE: sorry, Europeans, but all numeric measurements here are in the Imperial system.  I’ll let you do the conversions to metric. ‘Merica! 

 

 History and Length 

 

         The GTA was commissioned to be built in the 1990s by the Italian government to bring tourism and interest to areas of the Italian Alps primarily in the Piemonte region, which had seen a precipitous decrease in population in the last decades as the people from these regions have left traditional ways of life in farming and animal husbandry to pursue better opportunities in the more populated areas of Italy.  The trail touches on dozens of absolutely exquisite areas in Italy, and at the same time, it gives its travelers opportunity to enjoy the world-famous food and wine with loving hospitality from local Italians.  In 2010, 2 lovely German trekkers, Iris and Dieter, walked the route and wrote a detailed guidebook for it, published by Rother guides.  The trail is now extremely popular with Germans.  That being said, few people walk the entire trail in a year-most people opt to hike for 1 or 2 weeks a year, completing it in sections.   

         

          So, how long is this trail, and where does it officially start and end?  This is a comically complex question.  Rother, the German guidebook, describes the trail as spanning 575 miles.  However, the writers extended the route themselves to include about 90 miles of trail in the south via the Alta Via Monte Liguri (AVML) so that it goes all the way to the Mediterranean Sea, and also about 50 miles to the north to finish at kind of a random bus stop in Switzerland and the Swiss Gris Glacier.  “Officially”, it is my best understanding that the GTA begins at Viozene, Italy in the south and ends at Calasco di Molini in the north.  But, the trail is a spaghetti bowl of alternates-there are literally hundreds of different route options, and all of them are marked with the red-and-white randonee blaze and the GTA moniker.  One of the services that Iris and Dieter provided to GTA walkers is that they simplified the route by making a bunch of objective choices for their guide and track.  For American thru-hiking purists who want to know, “EXACTLY what is the route so I can know that I hiked a pure hike?”  You’ll get nothing more than an Italian shrug in response.  Think of it the way we think of the Continental Divide Trail-you can hike the Butte route, or the Anaconda cutoff, or Mack’s inn, or Henry’s Lake, or the Gila-and as long as you walk a continuous footpath from Mexico to Canada….it’s a CDT thruhike.   

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         I myself started from the Mediterranean Sea at the Rother guide’s southern terminus, and I walked to the Swiss border at Zwischbergen, which is farther than the “official” Italian northern terminus and south of the Rother end.  This felt like the perfect amount of GTA for me.  

 

 Difficulty/is this a good first hike? 

 

         Think of the GTA as the Appalachian Trail on steroids, with the scenery of the Pacific Crest Trail.  For almost its entirety the GTA  is an extremely well-marked, well-maintained trail.  Better-marked than the Haute Route Pyrenees, with higher-quality trail, you do not need any technical skills such as rock scrambling or ice axe skills to hike  the GTA.  You can take spicier alternates if you wish, but the GTA truly is a WALKER’s trail.  You do not need to be a mountaineer on this route.  You do, however, need buns of steel-or at least you’ll have them by the end.   Which brings me to my next point, namely that this is not a great first trail for the vast majority of hikers.   

 

         Thruhiking is the ultimate endurance sport.  You push your body to its slow-burn limit and then you get up and do it again the next day.  I try not to be a gatekeeper when it comes to hiking because I truly believe it is “every man’s sport”-you just need your 2 feet and a sandwich, and humans have been doing this literally forever.  However, it comes down to one question-are you going to have fun at THIS, or would you be better-suited to start with a less aggressive trail and build your muscular endurance up over time?   If you have already hiked one long trail-say, the PCT, or the Haute Route Pyrenees, or the GR10-you’ve had the experience of 8-12 hours a day of cardiovascular exercise, you have built up your core and back muscles to carry a pack, your feet will have hardened and changed to accommodate long foot travel, and your gear and footwear choices will be pretty dialed.  If the GTA is your first thruhike, the likelihood that you will suffer a sports injury or just feel like shit after a week is high.  It’s just too much exertion for a body that hasn’t built up to this.  But for the already-initiated, the GTA is a sparkling gem of a hike-a delight to all of your senses, every single day.  I dearly hope more thruhikers from the USA in particular consider this special trail. 

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My background before the GTA

 

         I finished my triple crown in 2015 with a southbound thruhike of the CDT. I also got into mountaineering in 2014 by take the Seattle Mountaineers Basic Alpine Climbing 6 month course and energetically climbed and scrambled about 40 peaks in Washington over several years.  My lifestyle is such that I spend almost the full year doing big trips in the mountains-and I have hiked about 14,000 lifetime miles on the long-distance trips alone, not including shorter trips when I am working.  So, although I have had to deal with some muscle imbalances that have developed over time, in general there is enough "muscle memory" to be able to start something like the GTA without too much immediate preparation beforehand.   ​ 

Resupply 

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         Resupply took some getting used to on the GTA for me, even though I had some experience hiking in Europe.  You just have to think of it differently than the US.   I am used to being totally self-sufficient-carrying fuel, a stove, and 3-5 days of food at a time feels normal to me.  The GTA has 2 things that run counter to that style.  Firstly, the GTA is peppered with full-service rifugios, about every 3-8 miles, along almost its entire route (minus the AVML in the south).  These rifugios will offer a basic breakfast like toast and butter/jam, lunch like a big sandwich or a plate of pasta, and elaborate 3-4 course dinners with local wine that will leave you bursting at the seams of your stretchy hiker shorts and happy.   In between the rifugios, there are villages.  Some of these have an alimentari (grocery store), but not all, and opening hours can vary-most are closed all afternoon, and if it is Sunday, well, forget it.  I ran into a couple of times where I needed to stay in a rifugio because I had run out of hiking food, and had hiked through 3-4 villages over several days with no open grocery.   The Rother guide, although wonderfully detailed, is unhelpful in this regard.  Most European hikers do not stay out with no services for days at a time-they tend to stay in the rifugios almost every night, eating what is provided.  So, the book is written from this perspective-perhaps a comment about shops, which may or may not be updated/accurate, and detailed info about the rifugios.  Additionally, the Rother guide is written with an assumption that you will be hiking about 2-7 hours per day, almost never more.  So using it as an info source in the American style was a bit “clunky.”

 

         In retrospect, it would have been handy to know exactly where the grocery stores were-but to only eat packaged food out of the backpack would have been a horrible waste of what the Piemonte has to offer in terms of world-class food and drink.  I would recommend a hybrid approach.  For two days, sleep on the exquisite ridge lines in your tent, the cuckoo birds singing you to sleep, and eat risotto out of your pot-then stay in a village, and rest in the wonderful warm hospitality that northern Italy so eagerly offers (and maybe drink a little too much Barbaresco red wine).

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 Weather 

 

         I started hiking June 8th, from the southern terminus at Ventimiglia on the coast, north.  I had absolutely no idea what the snow is typically like in the Italian Alps, but I figured I would be better off starting low and heading towards Switzerland.  As it happened, I got very lucky in one regard-it was a historically low snow year in the Alps, and I encountered zero snow.  The highest point of the GTA is about 9300 feet, which I encountered 3-4 weeks into the hike.  This would have been very snowy in other years, I learned from talking to other hikers.  I met some German hikers who had started the GTA southbound the previous year from Switzerland in July.  They walked in deep snow almost every day, for weeks.   For future hikers, my best advice would be to contact the Club Alpino Italiano (CAI) and ask about current year snow levels.  They have an active Facebook group where you could ask questions like this.  June, I learned, is considered very early to be in the Alps.  This wasn’t terribly relevant to me, except that many services-huts and restaurants-were closed in June.  If you are dependent on a particular rifugio or restaurant for food or water, and you are starting your hike in June, it would be prudent to contact them and ensure they are open.  

 

  In terms of weather, I had about 7-10 days where a weather system had settled on the region and it rained/thunderstormed every afternoon.  This was at the end of June.  It was a warm rain; different from the cold Pyrenees rain.  I did carry a raincoat and rain pants but never felt at risk for hypothermia.  Otherwise, every day was spectacularly sunny.  It was generally pleasant temperatures, 70-80s, during the day, maybe 50s at night.  It did start to become uncomfortably hot in July, high 90s, as I approached Switzerland.  Notably, just several days after I finished the trail the 3rd week of July, there were massive forest fires in Italy that shut down trails and even the rail lines.  This is always the advantage of hiking earlier in the season, but many years this will imply more snow to contend with.

 

 Gear 

 

My gear has changed a lot over the years, and I am not particularly ultralight.  However, it is easy to keep the base weight down with how light modern backpacking gear is.

 

         I’m carrying the Z Packs Duplex tent like many, many other thruhikers.  It’s not my favorite, but it weighs one pound, and it is surprisingly wind-stable.  The angles are too sloped at the head and the feet, so if it is raining or there is condensation, you will get your head or your foot box of your sleeping bag wet (or both).  This seems avoidable for a $600 tent, and Z packs has notoriously bad/rude customer service-I wouldn’t purchase from them again, but I’ll use the Duplex until it wears out.           My pad is the Thermarest NeoAir Xlite Women’s.  It’s light, warm, and comfortable enough.  It did pop once already , 3 days after I bought it, and REI replaced it. The current version lasted the entire GTA with no issues.  I was careful not to put it on spikey things.  Therm-a-rest makes a 4 oz inflatable pad called the Uber Light which Scott carried last summer and I believe it popped 3 separate times.  It seemed like it was just too lightweight and easy to get a hole in for thruhiking.  

 

         For my sleeping bag, I carried the Feathered Friends Petrel 10 Women’s bag.  I am an extremely cold sleeper and love this bag.  It’s unbelievably light for how warm it is-but 2 pounds is not the lightest bag out there.  Many people who sleep warm would definitely be able to get away with less sleeping bag in the summer on the GTA. 

 

         My backpack is the Hyperlite Mountain Gear 3400 Southwest.  I absolutely adore this pack and this company.  It carries however much you cram into it, even huge food carries (not relevant on the GTA but for instance, 8 days last year on Dirtmonger’s Great Basin Trail), comfortably shunting the weight onto the wide hip belt.  I don’t thinkanyone in the game has produced a superior design to this pack, especially for the weight (2 pounds).   

 

       For my stove, I have an ancient MSR Pocket Rocket that Steam bought me back in 2010 after the Appalachian Trail.  It’s great.  It weighs something like 3 ounces and….well….always works. A note about fuel on the GTA.  All I can say is…….  Before we started, Constanza made us both get the gigantic 500 gram isobutane canister since we didn’t know where fuel was going to be available.  That turned out to be extremely wise.  I *think* fuel was available only in Entracque, Susa, and Alagna.  I didn’t cook every night, so I didn’t even finish my 500 gram canister-but if you are going to hike the GTA with this kind of stove, keep in mind that the small 4 ounce canister might not get you between places you can buy fuel.  Additionally, take care that you do not buy the blue French “Camping-gaz” canister.  They don’t fit on stoves like the Pocket Rocket or Jetboil.  They have a different attachment. Denatured alcohol was not really available, although if you speak Italian you might be able to figure out an alternative by talking to a shopkeeper.  Lots of villages had a little “odds-and-ends” store which is called a tabaccheria in Italian, with hardware supplies.  I just didn’t explore this option because it wasn’t relevant to me. 

 

         For rain, I carried a Mammut lightweight rain coat and the Granite Gear Helium rain pants.  They were sufficient/fine.  I did use them a bunch of times.  I would not skip rain gear on this trail.  Think Appalachian Trail weather and climate. For clothes, I hiked in a cheap pair of running split shorts from Target and an Icebreaker tank top.  I carried 3 additional long sleeve shirts, which was overkill-2 would have been fine.  I carried 2 sets of leggings, one for sleep and one for hiking.  I carried 3 pairs of hiking socks, fluffy sleep socks, and 7 pairs of underwear.  Yes, yes, I know this is overkill-but for crying out loud, I like clean underwear (and ya’ll are nasty who carry one pair.).   A lightweight down puffy like the Ghost Whisperer or Down Sweater would be fine for the GTA.  I had a massive Feathered Friends coat with me because I’m going to the Nordic Arctic right after this and didn’t have any way to get it sent to me mid-trip.  That was annoying to carry but fun to wear (although my hiking comrades liked to tease me about my preparedness for Everest in the sunny warm Italian countryside).   The rest of my gear-headlamp, cook kit, bathroom stuff-is not unique.  My base weight is around 12 pounds.

 

  Navigation/Beta/Maps 

 

       I carried the full Rother guidebook, English version, and I had the GPX tracks of both the Rother guide and Doing Miles loaded into the Gaia navigation app on my smartphone.  When you buy the Rother guide, you are given a code to download the track.  This is worthwhile.  Everyone probably wouldn’t opt to carry the full hard copy book, but I really enjoyed reading it every night and it is full of information and history about the region and the route.  Other European hikers around me were carrying paper maps of the GTA, but I didn’t ask which maps these were or where to get them.   An important note about Gaia’s “Gaia Topo” map.  This actually had EXCELLENT detail in regards to topography, place names, and even available alternative trails.  I was pleasantly surprised, because last summer in Nevada, Gaia Topo would frequently identify a “trail” which would end up being a faint dirt track or just gone, long swept away by the desert.  Scott and I joked that Gaia was incredibly optimistic.  Not the case here.  Every single thing Gaia Topo identified as a trail turned out to be a good trail.  If you’re planning to navigate with Gaia on trail, you don’t need any more base map than this, in my opinion, such as the Italian equivalent of the USGS quadrants.   It was useful to have both the Rother track and the Doing Miles track.  See above for my discussion about the “pure” GTA.  

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Cultural considerations  

 

         I didn’t speak any Italian at all before the GTA.  I do speak fluent Spanish, which was helpful.  Italians in the Piemonte were patient, kind, friendly, and helpful almost to a person.  As I picked up a bit more Italian as I hiked, I was delighted to find Italians I met were happy to plunk along with me in Italian, even if I wasn’t adding too much to the conversation.    I met almost zero Italians hiking the GTA.  I met many, many Germans on the GTA, all of whom were walking south from the Swiss border (this is how the Rother guide is written.). As a solo hiker without a lot of Italian capacity, I would recommend hiking south for this reason if you speak English or German.  There really is a sizable hiking community in the high season on the GTA, but it is almost exclusively a southbound community.  There isn’t any logical reason in terms of the season or travel logistics to hike south.  People just tend to hike the way the guide is written.I met zero Americans on trail.  I dearly hope this changes in the future, because this is an incredible hike that Americans should experience.  Italians were always surprised and frequently delighted to learn I was American.   

 

To/From Logistics

 

         Getting to and from the GTA is easy.  To the Rother southern terminus at Ventimiglia on the Mediterranean Coast, just take Tren Italia from wherever you have flown in.  I flew into Milan and easily took the train for about 30 euros.  A useful website for train tickets in Europe is thetrainline.com .  Additionally, you can plot most transit in Europe using rome2rio.com .  This website collects the time tables for trains and buses with better accuracy than Google maps.  You just type in your starting and ending points and it gives you the options.   At the Rother northern terminus in Switzerland, there is an easy bus to the Swiss train station at Alpi di Cruina.  I got off south of here and easily took the bus from Gondo, Switzerland instead to Brig, then the train to Zurich to fly out.  I will also note that the “official” northern terminus of the GTA, Molini di Calasco, has frequent bus service into Domodossola, a small city.  From Domodossola you could easily take the train anywhere you need. 

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