Bonus Peak | Gran Paradiso, Italy | 4061m

This wasn't originally on my list to do but the opportunity came up and I just had to say yes to my first 4000m!

I had just finished my hike on Austria's Grossglockner when I was wondering where to head to next. The next thing I received a message from two friends that I had met back in Montenegro hiking up Zla Kolata. Kim and Santa, they were also doing high points around Europe and they had messaged me to say that they would be heading to Gran Paradiso in the next few days before making an attempt on to Switzerland's Dufourspitz.

This was great for me. I was looking at how I was going to tackle Dufourspitze and although Gran Paradiso wasn't on my list, I thought of it as a great training opportunity and a perfect acclimatization hike.

I headed over to meet them a couple of days later at the start of the trail for Gran Paradiso in a place called Pont. I picked up some gear that I needed to hire on my way down there. We got to the car park about 5 pm. From here it was an hour and a half walk to the Vittorio Emanuele II refuge where we would stay the night.

Even starting this late in the evening it was still really hot.

The next morning we set the alarms for 3:45am for a quick breakfast before the hike. We left the hut around 4:30am. I was actually quite surprised to see how may other people were doing it. There was a trial of headlights lighting all the way into the distance. If i were to guess there were roughly 100 other people that were heading to the summit of Gran Paradiso that morning.

The start was just a standard hike, then after about half an hour there were certain groups that were splitting off to walk a different trail over some snow. We followed the majority up along a ridge. It turned out that we followed the path over the glacier.

We put our crampons on, roped up, and assessed from the rocks above what direction to go over the glacier. We were a little slow with getting the rope set up between us, but this was the first time any of us had used rope without a guide. But we were soon catching everyone up again on the glacier and overtook a few of the other groups.

The walk was fairly easy, nothing too difficult. We just need to make sure that we were cautious of were we were walking as there were some very deep crevasse's in the ice!

We were about the middle of the pack when we got to the

The top really felt quite crowded.

We had read that the Madonna statue was not actually the highest point of the mountain but instead another 15 minute walk or so further on.