The Orco Valley
THE ORCO VALLEY
The Orco Valley is one of the most important valleys of the Piemont Region. More than forty kilometres long, it gives access to the southern slopes of the Gran Paradiso massif, stretching out from west to east - that is perpendicularly to the valleys located in the Valle d’Aosta Region, on the northern side of the group. This fact is actually a bit strange and is supposedly connected with the unusually strong erosive forces of the river Orco, a river that did not adapt to the maximum slope, like the rivers of the Aosta Valley, but instead cut deep into the gneiss layer below, creating the typical landscape of the Orco Valley, characterized by beautiful rock gorges, as for example the gorge one reaches just beneath the basin of Ceresole. It must be the beauty of the Orco Valley that made it acquire its present fame; the side valleys form a special microcosm whose distinctive feature is the unusual gneiss rock that visibly fills every corner of the valley with slabs, walls and moutonneed rocks. This characteristic which it shares with the adjacent Val Grande di Lanzo contributed to transform the Orco Valley into one of Italy’s iconic climbing sites on granite, no less than the Mello Valley in the Central Alps. It is true that neither hiking and trekking nor mountaineering are unusual enough in the Orco Valley to distinguish it from any other valley in the Alps. As to the rock of the Orco Valley, the Gorge of Balma Fiorant is one of the most appealing sites for rock climbers, a place where several walls have already been explored at the beginning of the Seventies – rock faces that, up to then, had not even been noticed by man. The unique beauty of some of these walls has even led to a comparison with certain features of the Yosemite Valley in California, though on a minor scale. The first routes were put up on the most impressive walls of the valley, whereupon climbers continued their exploration above and below the gorge. Sergent was climbed, a mountain towering high above Ceresole; then came the so-called Aimonin Tower above Noasca, and, finally, a series of minor rock structures. Rock climbers eventually took to regarding this small granite island in the mid section of the valley as a distinct microcosm, as if the mountains in all the other corners of the valley did not exist; for many years the name “Orco Valley” denoted the area between the two villages of Rosone and Ceresole. It was only later on that also the mountains overlooking the valley, such as Percia, Courmaon, Monte Castello and Gran Carro, took on an alpine identity of their own. An analogous process was developing in the Mello Valley, where several granite structures located in the lower regions of the valley were being explored during the very same period…
The Orco Valley can no doubt look back onto a history of intense alpine activity: today, it owns the status of an icon - following the words of the men who have celebrated the historical alpine epoch of the early 1970s, named the “Nuovo Mattino“ (Nuovo Mattino was a movement during the seventies which influenced mountaineering and the methods used for climbing: emphasising freedom and transgression, refusing the mountaineering culture of reaching the summit at all costs: Nuovo Mattino followed the dogma of “free” climbing inspired by the Yosemite philoshophy”); an alpine history which, far from being continuous, includes some long periods of stagnation. Every wall described in this guidebook can be seen as a piece of this history, although it is humans who write history. The climbers who wrote this specific piece of history are so numerous that it is practically impossible to mention each one of them, without neglecting anyone. Whereas the most famous of these climbers have operated on close to all the walls, the more discrete ones were drawn to some minor rock faces which they ended up appointing as their personal gardens. This explains why it has not always been easy to trace reliable information, in an attempt to write what may be considered the minor history of the Valley – which doesn’t necessarily mean “less important than the official one”... Basically, one tends to speak of the Orco Valley in mere connection with the Nuovo Mattino , without realizing that there are 30 more years of climbing history to be told! The thing that made Rock Paradise, the former edition of Orco Valley, particularly interesting, is the fact that each single wall was linked to a specific person, a person whose portrait was suited to match the character of the rock on which he had expressed himself best. It is my wish to maintain this approach as much as possible in this new guidebook; I intend to speak of the more recent years as well, about all the tendencies that have emerged. Well aware of the fact that during the past ten years the leading figures whose charisma had contributed to inspire the upcoming generations, have altogether disappeared, as well in the Orco Valley as everywhere else. As I pointed out in the introduction, the present guidebook treats the technical aspects more accurately than the previous edition, attributing equal importance to both historical and cultural issues. All routes have been integrated with the respective technical accounts, and a considerable effort was made to improve the overall evaluation, aiming towards a more homogeneous result, matching the evaluation used worldwide for the most outstanding granite climbing sites. Back in the days of the Nuovo Mattino the Orco Valley was not much more than a sort of garden for a restricted