The Italian Huts Where Mountaineering Was Born

At the top of a steep trail that rises swiftly from an alpine valley with almost no switchbacks or other relief from the pitch, past scrubby trees and boulders, past wild blueberries and flowers, up two cliffs, over one snowfield, and across, repeatedly, a frigid meltwater stream that cascades off the side of the mountain, sits a small alpine hut called Bivacco Giusto Gervasutti, used mostly by mountaineers on their way to the peaks beyond.

Located in the northwest of Italy, Val d’Aosta is the country’s smallest, least populous, and most mountainous region—and it has over 3,100 miles of public hiking trails and even more miles of mountaineering routes. Bordered by France to the west, Switzerland to the north, and the Piedmont region to the south and east, Val d’Aosta is home to many of the highest and most forbidding peaks in Europe, including Mont Blanc, and Courmayeur, the picturesque resort town widely regarded as the birthplace of mountaineering and alpine tourism. 

The Mont Blanc massif straddles the border between France and Italy, and as I set out with alpine guide David Pellissier and photographer Benjamin Rasmussen, my route snakes up the Italian side of the range. It is a hot August afternoon, and we start from the idyllic green ribbon of Val Ferret. Far above loom the black, granite, sawtooth peaks of Grandes Jorasses, one of the massif’s assemblages of several four-thousanders, or summits exceeding 4,000 meters (around 13,100 feet). David, who is 56, has been guiding clients in the Alps for more than 25 years. He moves his feet as a pianist moves his fingers. Ben—laden with photography equipment—and I are considerably less elegant than our guide, who appears to have never been short of breath in his life.

Suddenly, as we near the hut, the Fréboudze glacier swings into view. The beauty of its fluted, blue-and-gray face is transfixing. The glacier is streaked with traces of the black granite it has crushed in its ancient descent, like dough under a rolling pin. Glaciers here, as everywhere, are disappearing; the Alps are warming faster than just about any other place on Earth. The mountains have always been where we can confront our finitude and nature’s eternality, but looking at this river of ice that carved itself into the mountain I’m standing on, I’m dismayingly conscious of its fragility.

It’s evening, and we’ve been walking uphill for about four hours when we reach Gervasutti, peeking over a rocky ledge above the glacier. Shaped like a section of tube, with a row of porthole windows on each side, the hut recalls an airplane fuselage resting on a precipice. Gervasutti is one of a small but growing number of modern backcountry huts in Val d’Aosta that, in contrast to older huts, embrace their stunning settings and provide users with new comfort and functionality. These new off-grid, first-come-first-served overnight shelters—there are nearly 10 of them—are publicly accessible via trails and maintained on a volunteer basis, mostly by their users. From a design perspective, these huts, like more than 20 others that have been built in recent years across the seven Alpine countries, represent perhaps the most fertile period in backcountry hut design since the invention of hiking.

For millennia, walking in the mountains was something done by pilgrims, travelers, armies, and people taking goods to market; it was not a recreational activity. The first structures outside of villages in Val d’Aosta were probably Stone Age shelters in the high pastures used seasonally by cowherds. Later, the Romans built roads and military outposts at key passes, and in the Middle Ages, monastic orders constructed abbeys in the Alps to shelter pilgrims and travelers. But what few buildings there were in the Alps were in the mid-alpine zone, not the rugged peaks of the high-alpine zone.

An enormous change in land use started when Mont Blanc was first summited in 1786. The ascent marked the birth of a new activity and a new arena for human achievement: alpinism, or the exploration of the region’s high peaks. In the mid-19th century, ambitious climbers topped Europe’s highest mountains one by one.

The idea of public shelters for people recreating in the outdoors arose independently in many places, but in Italy, there emerged two classes of structures, still in existence today: rifugi, larger, seasonally staffed, hostel-like huts that offer hot meals and running water, and bivacchi, which are smaller and more rough-and-ready. The peaks of the region are today dotted with a network of around 150 that serve as mountain infrastructure, offering community, making remote routes more accessible, and, above all, providing a measure of safety in an environment where the weather can change suddenly in any season.

Before a hut existed on this site, mountaineers used to camp, or "bivouac," here, hence the name. Gervasutti is not far from the site of one of the first alpine huts built in this region, in 1925. Like most early huts, it offered only marginal advantages over the freezing ground: It was a drafty, uninsulated, half-barrel-shaped, wood-and-metal structure with a roof too low for standing.

Designed by Leap Factory for the University subsection of the Italian Alpine Club, Turin, and built in 2012, Gervasutti was such an aesthetic departure from early huts that it sparked something of a design reset in alpine backcountry architecture (it even appeared on the cover of Domus magazine), though it was also polarizing. Architect Stefano Girodo, engineering unit director at Leap Factory, likens it to "an alien spacecraft that lands and sets itself up as a temporary guest of the landscape around it." Stefano has little patience for those who romanticize the drafty discomfort of older huts or cling to a faux-traditional alpine aesthetic—"the stone hut, the wooden chalet." The fact is, he says, "there is no traditional architecture at high altitude."

In Gervasutti’s tiny vestibule, we ditch our packs and boots and select loaner slippers from a pile of purple rubber clogs. Through an inner door that acts as an air lock against drafts are two main rooms: an eat-in kitchen/living room and a 12-bed dormitory. At the table, two men look up from dehydrated camping dinners. They are friends, one Italian and one Dutch, and like us came specifically to see this unusual hut. Behind them is a big window—the end of the "tube"—that offers panoramic views of Val Ferret and the mountains beyond. Far below, I can see the stream where we started, gleaming like a thin, silver thread.

Settling into Gervasutti, I unpack my camping stove and open one of the porthole windows for ventilation. With a sommelier-like flourish, David produces a bottle of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo from his pack, and Ben and I boil fresh agnolotti, which David directed us to bring. This instruction struck both of us as odd; like our hut neighbors tonight, I default to dehydrated dinners when hiking. Through the window, the peaks of the Pennine Alps are glowing pink in the setting sun, and as I drink wine and spoon up agnolotti and supermarket jar sauce, I start to wonder if everything I ever thought I knew about eating and drinking in the backcountry is hopelessly bereft. As soon as it’s dark I climb into my bunk, registering the international hut soundtrack of faint snoring as I settle into oblivion.

Some days later, on a Saturday afternoon, Ben and I are in a meadow surrounded by about a dozen people picnicking at another alpine hut, Bivacco Claudio Brédy. They’ve gathered here in honor of their late friend Claudio Brédy, and for many, this is their first time seeing in person the hut that bears his name, a sleek black box that stands on a ridge at the head of a valley. The picture window frames a view of the Alps. Claudio was active in politics and served as mayor of the nearby town of Gignod; he grew up in Val d’Aosta, and it seems he knew everybody.

A childhood friend of Claudio’s, Carlo, pours wine, and people pass around slices of local sausages and a kind of supple, delicious cured beef called motzetta. Someone takes a pocketknife and carves up a wheel of fontina made with milk from Claudio’s father’s cows, which have grazed in this valley for generations. Claudio’s widow, Angela Battisti, and their eldest daughter, Francesca, a student in Milan, tell me that, above all, Claudio was defined by his curiosity, particularly about the outdoors. Walking to the hut, Francesca says, "I love the mountains because here I can feel alone, even when there are other people."

In 2017, at 53, just after returning from a mountaineering trip, Claudio died hiking near the family’s weekend cabin. "You know, I think that every one of us has a fate, and when it’s your time, it’s your time," says Angela, sitting next to her daughter at the hut’s table, in front of the big window. "He climbed a four-thousander that same week, and he fell in our own backyard. It’s so hard to find consolation." Francesca squeezes her mother’s hand.

Building a hut was Claudio’s father’s idea. The mountains are an inherently hazardous environment, and many bivacchi memorialize people who died on these peaks; some, like Bivacco Brédy, are built as such, and others come to serve the purpose over time informally. (On a shelf at Gervasutti, I noticed a photo and a rosary left for an alpine guide who died in a fall in 2017.) Several of Claudio’s friends work in architecture-related fields, including Roberto Dini, a professor of architecture in Turin and an expert in alpine building, and the Brédy family tapped them to hold a competition to select a hut design. The contest was structured as a class on designing for the alpine zone, and the concept ultimately chosen was the work of a team of three: Skye Sturm, Chiara Tessarollo, and Facundo Arboit.

Bivacco Brédy was helicoptered to the site in pieces and erected in two days in October 2021. It has already proved popular, thanks to its stunning location and its relative accessibility, around two hours by foot from the nearest road. Francesca likes reading the visitors’ book. "Last week, I came here and I read the whole book, and some people wrote that even if they didn’t know my dad, they feel like they know him, coming here," she says.

Our plan is to spend the night here with Skye and her husband. Two hikers arrive at dusk, keen to see the new bivacco, making a full house of six. We drink wine and talk about huts into the night while an electrical storm lights up the peaks. Skye is originally from Fairbanks, Alaska, and she grew up accompanying her family into the backcountry for weeks at a time while her father, who studied snow and ice, did fieldwork. She first saw the Bivacco Brédy site in 2019, on a class visit with Roberto, some local officials, and the Brédy family. It was June, and there was snow on the ground. "I had been trying to convince anybody who was willing to come stay the night with me in a tent," she says. "I wanted to see how the light changes. I wanted to feel the cold of the night, understand what it was like at all times, and really live and breathe it. I figured, we’re not gonna get that going up for an hour."

Skye managed to convince only three people, but among them were Chiara and Facundo. They ultimately envisioned a tiny, 129-square-foot building that conveys, as Skye puts it, "the feeling of being fully immersed in the environment and yet protected and safe and warm and comfortable." The hut rises away from the ground at an angle, mirroring the slope of the mountainside, oriented to maximize views, light, and solar energy. The wood-paneled interior has folding bunks, a table and seating, and an entryway. Skye and her partners meticulously designed every inch, down to the width of the bunks and the kind of rope used to weave the mattresses. There’s no kitchen, but a large, flattish boulder outside makes a natural place for a camp stove, and two nearby tarns are a water source.

Skye is proud that Bivacco Brédy has added to the number of more thoughtfully designed and environmentally conscious backcountry huts. "Gervasutti was one of the first huts to say, well, what can architecture do for this environment? Can we make stuff that’s very minimal, easily transportable with a helicopter, but insulated?"

At dawn the next morning, I’m boiling water for coffee when I hear an eerie sound reverberate through the valley—the marmots are whistling. As I start to wonder if that’s just their way of greeting the day, the source of their disturbance walks up: a huge black dairy cow. Soon the hut is surrounded by them. A few miles from this hut is an archaeological site where, more than 5,000 years ago, people for the first time felled trees to graze cows, making this, as far as we know, the oldest high-elevation pasture in the Alps.

We often get the sense, in nature, that we are alone and perhaps even unique in our experiences; although we know that people have been here before us, the mountains have a way of shrugging off our traces so that they retain a sense of newness that a city does not. But, of course, that is an illusion, and what we think of as nature is not separate from us. As the sun comes up over the ridge and the cows filter out into this meadow—their meadow—I feel joy in witnessing a daily scene that has been playing out in these mountains since long before I was here.

A little after 6:00 a.m. on our fourth morning in Val d’Aosta, Ben and I are waiting at a grass helicopter pad at the foot of Monte Rosa, the second-highest mountain in the Alps. With us are engineer Luca Frutaz and photographer Marco Beck Peccoz. Marco, the vice president of the foundation that created and maintains the hut, is tall and easygoing and carrying a bundle of bed linens destined for Bivacco Mamo Comotti, the hut we’re flying to today. Luca specializes in high-altitude wood construction, and his firm built the hut and Bivacco Brédy. Bivacco Comotti is accessible only to mountaineers and would be impossible for hikers like Ben and me to reach on foot, so Luca and Marco have arranged for us to hitch a ride up on one of the supply flights that regularly crisscross Val d’Aosta. The pilot touches down, we jump on, and a few minutes later he deposits us at 11,800 feet.

Bivacco Comotti is nestled on a narrow ridge with extraordinary views down to the valley, and once the noise of the rotor fades the only sound is whistling wind. The hut is a small, steel-clad rectangle that sleeps six under a skillion roof that angles toward the mountain.

Marco was a lifelong friend of the late Massimo Comotti, known as Mamo. Comotti, an architect and mountaineer, was killed in an avalanche while climbing in these mountains in 2009 at age 44. (Marco, who was with him, was partially buried but survived, along with a third member of their group.) Comotti’s loved ones decided to build this hut, completing the project in 2015. The chosen design, by local architect Massimo Dufour, has proved beautiful, practical, and replicable—a hut of the same design was erected on a nearby peak in October. They picked this site because of the spectacular views and because it was the camping spot along the summit route. (It also seemed appropriate that their mountaineer friend’s hut would be used by mountaineers.) During one of Luca and Marco’s first visits to the hut site, Marco remembers, they saw an ermine watching them as they worked. "It’s a little silly, but I took it as a sign," Marco says. "I always thought, when Mamo died, maybe he became an animal and stayed up in the mountains."

Luca explains that Bivacco Comotti was built in four pieces, pointing to where you can make out the seams on the Cor-Ten steel cladding; the modules were then helicoptered into place and erected on-site in three days. Like all Luca’s projects, it makes extensive use of wood, which he prefers at altitude because it’s strong but not heavy, so it can be flown, and weathers very slowly here.

While we talk, Marco changes the beds, and Luca boils water for Nespresso. I take my mug outside. The setting of Bivacco Comotti is undeniably beautiful, but I’m a little cowed by it. The helicopter had catapulted me into a zone beyond my abilities, and the land seems to be operating on a different scale. This ridge is known as Lyskamm’s Nose, and it bisects the southern face of Monte Rosa, leading to a peak called Lyskamm, one of the range’s four-thousanders. Mountaineers usually traverse the glacier and climb the nose to gain the ridge. The route takes six to nine hours in good weather, and from the tone of the entries in the hut book, people are generally grateful to reach it.

Luca and Marco are both mountaineers and backcountry skiers, and they talk personally about each peak. They also have a close-up view of the accelerating loss of snow and ice. "All this is disappearing," Luca says sadly. To people who know these mountains, words like "melting" don’t convey the scale of what is being lost; it’s more like something living is decaying.

It’s a fine morning and none of us are in any hurry to leave, so when the pilot returns, we ask him to detour to a nearby rifugio so we can experience more of Monte Rosa. From there, Luca and Marco explain, a cableway down to the valley is only a half-hour hike. As we take off, flying low enough to follow individual mountaineers trekking across the glacier, I have no idea what is about to hit us.

When the weather makes one of its abrupt turns, this environment reveals its innate hazards. As soon as we get to the rifugio, Luca and Marco sense something and suggest we leave. As we hurry down, a cloud bank rolls in. Without the sun, the temperature drops. Just as we reach a snowfield, it starts to rain. My boots keep slipping on the glazed crust of the snow, so I crouch and step in boot prints others have punched through the ice. I’m getting doused by icy rain and hail and begin to get very cold. But I don’t really worry until I hear a close-sounding thunderclap. Evacuating mountaineers rush past our group as if we’re standing still, their crampons sending chipped ice flying. Then, just as we reach a ridge, we see the first flash of lightning. Marco and Luca stiffen. "Avalanches and lightning are the only things I’m afraid of in the mountains," says Marco matter-of-factly.

I want off this exposed ridge. I’m sliding on my ass, clambering over boulders, lightning illuminating pools of hailstones eddying between them. I feel relieved upon finally reaching the cable car station. When I wring out my soaked jacket, frigid water runs over my knuckles.

The storm has cut power to the station, but when the weather eases, we depart and descend to a restaurant. The woman behind the counter wears the harried expression of a service worker stranded by a communications malfunction. Down here it’s 20 degrees warmer and barely drizzling. It’s astounding that this valley world of charcuterie and electricity can be overlaid by another so alien and that technologies like helicopters and cable cars can bring the two into uncanny proximity.

I’ve loved the mountains since I was a child in New Zealand, growing up in the shadow of the Southern Alps. But I find it hard to articulate that love or to explain what I am seeking when I go into them. I’d like to believe the majesty of these places is self-justifying and offers us, as certain Romantic writers suggested, a secular experience of grace. But notions of the mountain sublime lean on a kind of fakery—all those gauzy landscape paintings created from railroad viewing platforms. Perhaps, instead, walking in them suits us as animals, the way a whale enjoys diving in the ocean. I like the backcountry in part because of the chance it offers to step outside social roles and trust my body to put one foot in front of the other. But if venturing into the peaks were "natural," we’d always have done it.

And we wouldn’t have had to invent the idea of coming to the mountains for leisure—as it was, here, in Val d’Aosta. Historically, most people who lived close to the mountains spent little time in them. "My neighbors still tell me I’m crazy to climb mountains," the great mountaineer Reinhold Messner said of growing up in the Dolomites. "And they’re not entirely wrong."

For most of Western history, mountains were largely not seen as beautiful, though they could be sacred. The Romans generally thought of mountains as desolate and hostile; early Christians believed that they were created by the Flood and therefore stood as evidence of man’s estrangement from the divine. The Book of Isaiah says, "Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low." Medieval poets compared mountains to blisters, warts, and tumors. The late scholar Marjorie Hope Nicolson traced a revolution in how we "see" mountains, from horrid to beauteous, starting in the Enlightenment. She called this shift one of the most profound revolutions in human thought. Looking at the Alps, I can see risk, sure, but I do not see a wart. To know that people who walked this Earth took in the same sight and arrived at such a different reading is, in a way, impressive: If humanity can so dramatically reconceive its idea of such a large thing, what can’t we change our minds about?

The hike to our last hut, Bivacco Cosimo Zappelli, is different from the others we’ve done. The trail is wider, gentler, and more populated, passing by the occasional farmhouse, following the course of a river through an airy, mossy pine-and-birch forest. The hut lies at around 7,500 feet elevation, in the bowl of a meadow near a small glacial lake and beneath a semicircle of jagged peaks. As we near it after about four hours on the trail, I’m a little ahead of Ben, and I see something spring between two boulders up ahead: an ibex, the animal’s long, curved horns echoing the shape of its back as it leaps across the trail. It pauses on a rock to regard me, and I hold its gaze for a few seconds before it bounds away.

Our company for the night is a couple and their dog, both chefs and weekend hiker-mountaineers who live in the city of Aosta. By now, Ben and I are dab hands at hut dinner, boiling tortellini and warming jar sauce as if we’ve never heard of a dehydrated meal.

Bivacco Zappelli, which was also designed by architect Massimo Dufour, has a bunk room that sleeps 10, a separate kitchen and lounge area, and an entryway and deep deck oriented for maximum sun. Solar panels power interior lights, and the kitchen has real china dishes. Everything inside is made of wood, though, notably, it’s the only hut we visit that has plumbing. The hut book records dozens of entries per week throughout the summer.

To know that people who walked this Earth took in the same sight and arrived at such a different reading is, in a way, impressive.

The Zappelli hut, finished in 2021, replaced a previous one slightly lower in the valley that was destroyed by an avalanche in 2014. The popularity of the trail through this valley made finding a safe site on which to rebuild a priority for the mayor of the commune of La Salle, Loris Salice. Although the people of the town didn’t set out with the idea of creating a modern-style hut, Dufour’s design "immediately appealed to us," Loris says. The exterior is black with a squat, bulky shape, and Loris compares it to "a sort of big boulder among all the little boulders."

Its namesake, Cosimo Zappelli, was a mountaineer, alpine guide, author, photographer, and trained nurse. Cosimo grew up by the sea, but he dreamed of climbing mountains from an early age and started hiking as a teenager. In the early 1960s, Cosimo moved to Val d’Aosta and began pioneering new routes and tricky winter ascents, often partnered with another young climber, Walter Bonatti. "In 1962, ’63, they did the maximum," says Marco Zappelli, Cosimo’s son, a former guide and mountaineer. "They did everything there was to do." Walter, who was also from outside Val d’Aosta, went on to become internationally renowned as one of the sport’s 20th-century greats. Cosimo remained a mountaineer for the rest of his life.

The fact that his father was from elsewhere meant that, despite his skill, it took time for him to be accepted here, says Marco. "Val d’Aosta is just a very unusual part of Italy," he explains. "People have their own identity as Valdôtains. They don’t identify as Italians." Prior to the arrival of the railroad in the 19th century, traveling even from one valley to the next was arduous, and the isolation gave rise to a culture that could magnify tiny differences. "Do you know what I mean, mountain people? They aren’t very receptive. They’re kind of closed off. They’re afraid that someone is going to come in and change their way of life," says Marco. Life in Val d’Aosta in the midcentury was especially difficult; all of northern Italy had seen heavy Allied bombing during World War II, and in the Alps there was fighting against the Fascists and the Nazis, followed by postwar food and housing shortages. "It was a savage environment," he says. When Walter retired, he left Val d’Aosta for good, but Cosimo stayed, writing books, volunteering in alpine rescue, and eventually becoming the president of the Courmayeur alpine guides’ association. And now, his name is on a hut.

Marco was touched when the village leadership told him they wanted to name this hut after his father. "People really like it because it’s very different," he says proudly. "There aren’t many huts like it."

Cosimo died in a rock fall while climbing a peak on Mont Blanc in the summer of 1990 at age 56. Marco blames the accident partly on climate change; there were, he says, an unusual number of fatal accidents on the mountain that season, an early sign of changes in the high-alpine zone. Marco quit guiding in 2010. "The mountain environment is changing, and it’s become too dangerous," he says. "It’s better to go where there are huts, the mid-alpine zone, than to climb on Mont Blanc."

The following morning, I make coffee on the deck of the hut and sit, blinking in the sun. I mentally ready myself to hike back down to civilization. The chefs are preparing to hike over the pass into the glaciated valley on the other side, and watching them set off, I’m stricken with jealousy. I want to go farther, higher, to stay a little longer in mountainland. Instead, Ben and I shoulder our packs and start back down the gentle trail, picking wild blueberries and watching birds flit from boulder to boulder, following the oxbows of the stream that rushes through this meadow. When we reach the tree line and step into the cool forest, I’ve filled my cupped hands, and I eat the berries as we descend, saving the last one for the car.

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