Grande Rochère, from Planaval

Description

From the car park below the hotel, continue along the bridle path that leads to Alpe Ecules and leave it when you come to a bridge that allows you to cross over to the left bank of the Torrent de Planaval, where you meet a beautiful path that shortly afterwards crosses a steep little valley with some nice hairpin bends to arrive near the Bonalè hut. Leaving the hut to the right, go over some grassy bumps to the left to walk up the eastern slope of the Grande Rochere to meet the track with the first cairns on the left that crosses a grassy section and then goes over a scree section to the left of a small gully. Further up you cross the gully, where white arrows drawn on the rock indicate the passage, this section is called the "key passage" by some, a harmless passage of a few metres over rocks and debris. Instead of crossing, you could continue straight on, there are cairns, but then they disappear and you arrive laboriously below the petite Rochere, an hour from the summit of La Grande, not advisable. After the 'key passage', the track with cairns resumes, reaching a beautiful ridge from which the Aiguille de Bonalè appears imposingly, and the pass of the same name behind which the Dolent appears. Behind, the mountains from the Matterhorn, to Rosa, to Gran Paradiso, all the mountains of the Aosta Valley except Mont Blanc. We climb up the little ridge, then on well-marked detritus, we reach the pass between the petite and grande Rochere. All that remains is to ascend the harmless final crest, where the abundance of uphill and downhill tracks shows that you can climb anywhere. You thus reach the summit where the Mont Blanc chain finally appears in all its splendour.