trekking Italy

A hiker on a section of the Tour du Mont Blanc in Italy.

The Best Plan for Hiking the Tour du Mont Blanc

by

By Michael Lanza

You want to hike the Tour du Mont Blanc, but you’re not sure how hard it is, whether you can do it all, or even whether to hire a guide? One of the world’s great treks, the TMB is easy to do self-supported—but it’s not easy to figure out how to do that. When I hiked it with 12 family and friends of varying abilities—including my 80-year-old mother—I spent many pre-trip hours mapping out a flexible daily itinerary that allowed some in our group to use local transportation to avoid hard sections or bad weather, and everyone had a wonderful experience. This guide will show you how to duplicate that trip or customize your own.

Read on

A hiker on the Tour du Mont Blanc in Italy.

Hiking the Tour du Mont Blanc at an 80-Year-Old Snail’s Pace

by

By Michael Lanza

Our bus winds up a narrow road in the Vallée des Glaciers, below snowy peaks of the French Alps. We boarded it with about 10 other trekkers after a late-afternoon thunderstorm ripped the sky open while we enjoyed a café and tea with chocolate mousse and a slice of blueberry pie at the Auberge de la Nova in les Chapieux, a speck of a village along the Tour du Mont Blanc. As the bus rumbles into Ville des Glaciers, a cluster of old farm buildings, I ask the driver to stop.

My 80-year-old mother wants to get off and hike.

Read on

Trekkers on the Alta Via 2 in Parco Naturale Paneveggio Pale di San Martino, in Italy's Dolomite Mountains.

‘The World’s Most Beautiful Trail:’ Trekking the Alta Via 2 in Italy’s Dolomites

by

By Michael Lanza

We follow the zigzagging trail upward until it becomes lost beneath an unbroken snow cover. Then we follow the boot prints of the few trekkers who’ve ventured up here before us recently, a navigational strategy based on hope—the hope that unseen strangers knew where the path goes. A bit farther than I could hurl a stone to either side of us loom sheer walls of dark rock, rendered fuzzy by the fog, as if Vaseline coats our eyeballs. The cliffs rise hundreds of feet into the oblivion of a soupy, gray ceiling, the sky a dark bruise that looks almost close enough to touch. A drizzly rain seeps from the clouds, but the air is calm and there is no sound but our footsteps and breaths—and a faint rumbling of uncertainty in my gut.

Read on