Two days high in Italy’s Valmalenco for The North Face Offtrail Expedition, organized by Crusher Running: a night in a tent below the Rifugio Bignami and a treasure hunt toward the Fellaria Glacier. Nine miles walked alone after a mishap became the yardstick for reading a sign from 1860.
Nine Unplanned Miles
From Turin to Chiesa in Valmalenco is a long drive, and usually I forget it the moment I switch off the engine. Not this time. A crash on the highway keeps me stuck in traffic for more than an hour. By the time I park, the shuttle Crusher Running had arranged to take us all to the trailhead together has already left. The next one isn’t for another good hour.
I run the numbers quickly. An hour sitting and waiting, or nine miles on foot to base camp, alone.
I set off and slip into the woods.
For the first two miles I follow the road the shuttle would have taken. Then the map on my phone shows a track off to the left, a trail cutting straight toward the dam below the Rifugio Bignami, the mountain hut where our tents are waiting for the night. I take it without thinking. The forest closes in almost immediately, dense, and the light reaches the ground in patches.
On my feet are the The North Face Offtrail Ultra, the shoes the brand offered us to test over these two days. I have one habit I never break: before I run in a new shoe, I walk in it, because at a walking pace the foot has time to listen to it. The sock-like upper registers within a few minutes. It’s comfortable, and it stays breathable even when the climb starts to heat up the top of my foot. The midsole makes itself felt from the first steps, a soft presence underfoot over a floor of roots and stones. I cross a stream, hopping from rock to rock. Then the forest opens onto a mule track that climbs long and steady, one switchback after another.
Three hours alone. And I’m happy.
A few weeks ago we wrote about a mountain redesigned for people who don’t want to sweat, all terraces and high-altitude parking lots. On that mule track it comes back to me by contrast. For years I’ve told myself that reaching a place with a bit of effort makes it yours, and I think so now too, step after step. But underneath that thought another one grows, simpler and more useful. With every mile the body learns a measure. By the time I reach the top I know how much a mile uphill weighs, how much breath it asks for, how much water, how much time.
An Expedition in Miniature
I reach the hut with a hollowing hunger and the kind of full satisfaction known only to people whose legs are still warm from the trail. Around the camp I find the rest of the group. Many of them are young, and for a lot of them, I imagine, this is their first night in a tent in the mountains. The thought lifts my mood more than the view does.
The sun drops behind the ridges and the cold shows up right on schedule. We light the stoves. As on a real expedition, dinner is made on the spot: pouches of freeze-dried food to fill with hot water, seal, and wait on.
There’s a small irony in all this, and I notice it with affection. A few hours from home, we’re acting out the gestures of people crossing remote lands, hunched over our pouches while the stoves hiss in the dark. And yet the expedition Crusher Running and The North Face dreamed up holds together precisely because those gestures are real. The water takes the time it takes to heat, and the cold creeps into the fingers holding the spoon. A pasta and lentil soup, simple and steaming, tastes better than any soup has a right to. The expedition is in miniature. The hunger is life-size.
The night passes quietly. The real cold comes between four and six, when sleep is at its deepest, and the sleeping bag holds. At some point I unzip the tent and step out. Above it hangs a sky so thick with stars it’s almost loud. I stand there in the freezing air, more than 6,500 feet up, hands tucked under my armpits, longer than common sense would advise.
When too much time goes by without a night in a tent in the mountains, I start to miss it.
The Treasure No Map Marked
In the morning the Crusher crew hands us a paper map. On it: a plotted route, a series of checkpoints, and a list of objects to find. We split into three teams and head for the main glacier, and the Offtrail Ultra that walked the day before now start to run. This is clearly their home ground.
For a while I play in earnest. Then my eyes drift elsewhere, to the signs planted along the glacier trail, the ones that mark where the ice reached in years past. One stops me. It stands more than half a mile as the crow flies from where the glacier’s front begins today, and it says that in 1860 the ice came all the way here, to where I’m standing.
It’s September, nearly 8,200 feet up, and the thermometer reads over 77°F.
Half a mile. The day before I’d walked nine, and felt every one of them pass through my calves and my breath. In front of that sign I make an instinctive conversion, from the language of numbers to the language of legs. The figure stops being information to read and becomes a distance I know. I know how long it takes to cover. I know what it costs. The glacier lost it in little more than a century and a half, one step at a time, and I can almost count those steps.
The treasure hunt asked us to find objects hidden along the route. The biggest object in the valley was missing, and no map could have told us where to look for it. Yet it was that very route, drawn by Crusher Running to get us running and playing, that led so many young people to those signs. That morning the most valuable treasure was written on the plaques.
Between checkpoints we run a few easy miles in the Offtrail Ultra, in a place that feels suspended. And over those miles three groups of strangers become real teams. It happens without speeches. Shared effort under the same sun does in one morning what takes months of group training back in the city. By the end we look at each other with the complicity of people who’ve sweated up the same climb.
Walking Down, Counting Steps
The day ends with a long walk back to the cars. I go down slowly, legs full of the two days, and once again I let myself be taken by these places where nature reclaims its space with all its strength. Here you run, you walk, you breathe all the way down. Here, too, invisible and punctual, the bill arrives for what we do far away, in the cities and homes where we spend our ordinary days. The ice carries its mark, year after year.
A place like this belongs to everyone, and that’s exactly why no one will take care of it for us. Falling in love with it is easy; one night under those stars is enough. Taking care of it starts with noticing how much it has changed.
Walking down, I catch myself counting steps, and the count always comes back to the same number.