Hikes to the lakes of the Aosta Valley

Hikes to the most beautiful alpine lakes in the Aosta Valley, in the Monte Avic Natural Park and in the Valle del Rutor below its glacier.

The Aosta Valley has some of the clearest alpine lakes in the western Alps, and many of them are concentrated in two areas: the Monte Avic Natural Park, with its larch woods that look almost North American, and the Valle del Rutor, where the lakes lie at the foot of the glacier.

They range from the easy climb to the Rifugio Barbustel, in under three hours, to the long loop of the ten lakes of Monte Avic, which is best split over two days.

Serpentine rock and glacier lakes

The Mont Avic Natural Park, established in October 1989, was the first regional natural park in the Aosta Valley. Its character comes from the rock: much of the park lies on serpentinite, which produces poor soils unsuited to larch and Norway spruce, and here the mountain pine thrives instead, in a forest of about a thousand hectares that the park describes as an unusual extent for the Italian Alps. The dark, greenish rocks you see along the ten-lakes loop are that serpentinite, and they explain why the forest here looks so different from the neighbouring valleys.

The Rutor valley tells a story of water and fear. At its greatest extent the Rutor glacier dammed a lake that could empty suddenly, and the floods that followed struck the La Thuile valley for nearly three centuries; above Lago di San Grato, a chapel dedicated to Saint Gratus and Saint Margaret was built precisely to ward off the floods. Remember, finally, that in the Aosta Valley bivouacking in a tent is allowed only above 2,500 metres, from sunset to sunrise, and that the park has its own rules, which are worth checking before you set off.