A classic survival yarn: the mountain has been testing people who think they own a piece of it
Up on the plateau, where everyone goes, there are lakes scattered everywhere. Normal people climb up from Rifugio Savoia and walk straight ahead, toward whichever lake the trail signs point to that day.
I, as usual, did not do what normal people do. I decided I wanted to see the other lakes — the ones off to the right, the ones nobody mentions.
It seemed only fair to start at the rifugio, since the rifugio itself is not quite what it looks like. Today, it’s a place where you buy a coffee and a slice of cake before a hike. A century and a half ago, it was a royal hunting lodge — one of the wooden houses Vittorio Emanuele II had built across this plateau in the 1860s, after declaring the entire Gran Paradiso massif his private hunting reserve. The king wanted the ibex for himself, and he wanted it badly enough to ban anyone else from touching it. It is one of those details history hands you for free: the same selfish decree that let one man shoot as many ibex as he liked is the reason the species survived at all, while it vanished from the rest of the Alps.
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https://exegi.substack.com/p/it-takes-very-little-to-become-a
