To spend the Christmas holiday in Italy is very common. Italy has magnificent cities, wonderful museums and excellent food. Nonetheless other people came to Italy from the other part of the world to explore the natural beauty of the mountains near Turin. I organize the 1st of January hike on the last days. We had a very wierd winter without snow and with warm and nice weather. So instead of the classical snowshoes hike I could organize a Trekking peak from Turin, Rocca Patanua.
When we started our meeting at 9AM we were all a bit tired. Of course we greeted the new year and we did not sleep much. Nevertheless, we were pretty excited and it was clear that we would had start the 2016 with a very nice company, which is probably the most important thing in life, not only in the mountains.
The weather looked pretty dark and cloudy, but with a cappouccino and a brioches, life seemd to be better. And a nice surpirse was waiting for us at the start of our hike: while we were going up the Val Gravio, in between all the ancient mountain village, we suddenly broke the clouds and we find a perfect day. Moreover the sea of cloud was making the landscape just incredible. The higher we went the nicer the landscape was, as you can see from the pictures.
Rocca Patanua with its 2409 meters is an awsome target for our daily hike from Turin. At certain point it looks like we were about to abandon the hike due to phisical problem. But we overcome the problem, stayed togheter and we finally start the 2016 in the better way possible.
