Exceptional Snow Cover in the Western Alps, 2013–2014

Exceptional Snow Cover in the Western Alps, 2013–2014 is the winter’s defining environmental force: a half-century accumulation that buries roads, buildings, and familiar routes, then turns Barma into both shelter and a place of mortal danger. Snow changes the scale of ordinary journeys, conceals the signs by which the mountains are read, and makes Bruno’s eventual disappearance impossible to resolve with certainty.

Scale and Accumulation

The winter’s severity is given a precise measure after the fact. In the highest ski resorts, records showed three meters of snow at the end of December, six at the end of January, and eight by the end of February. The figures described the heaviest snowfall in the Western Alps for half a century. Pietro, reading them in Nepal, struggled to imagine what eight meters would look like in the high mountains; the account gives the number a human scale by observing that it was enough to bury woods, and far more than enough to bury a house.

The snow also reshaped the region’s traffic. After years with little snow, skiers streamed uphill from Milan and Turin, many with skis on their cars, as though the mountains had reopened as an amusement park. Their routes left the main road, but almost none turned toward Grana. Once Pietro took that junction, the other cars disappeared within a few bends. The contrast separates the crowded, recreational mountain from the village and high country that the story follows: the snowfall draws visitors toward the resorts while making access to Bruno’s world more arduous.

A Landscape Without Its Landmarks

Pietro sets out equipped for winter travel, buying snow chains on the motorway and snowshoes in the valley. In Grana, snow has accumulated against stables and haylofts, covered tractors, roofs, wheelbarrows, and manure heaps, and filled ruined buildings until they are nearly hidden. A narrow passage has been cleared between the village houses, while the snowplow has opened only enough road to turn around. Pietro leaves the car where that effort ends, climbs a hard snowbank, and continues on foot.

A summer journey of less than two hours takes him more than four. Even on snowshoes he sinks nearly to his knees, finding the way by remembered contours, slopes, and a passage among the pines rather than by a visible track or the usual ground-level landmarks. The snow has hidden the old cable lift’s winding gear, ruined walls, quarried stones, and the stumps of ancient larches. The river is reduced to a hollow between its banks; Pietro crosses at a randomly chosen point, leaps into fresh snow, and falls forward onto his hands without injury. Higher up, every few steps slip backward, sometimes carrying a small avalanche, so that he has to use his hands and point the snowshoes like crampons. At Bruno’s farmstead, snow reaches halfway up the stable windows. Wind has swept a narrow tunnel beside the mountain-facing wall, where Pietro stops to catch his breath. In that strip, the grass is dead and gray, and the continuing snowfall leaves white, gray, and black as the only colors he can see.

The lake, too, vanishes from view. Its basin is filled with snow, turning a familiar body of water into an apparently continuous surface. For the first time in years, Pietro walks straight across it rather than around it, heading toward Barma. Snow has made the direct route possible while concealing the water beneath his feet: the changed landscape offers a passage and withholds what lies under it at the same time.

Barma and the Avalanche

At Barma, the snow nearly matches the little house in height. Bruno has cleared its roof and dug a trench around the walls, widening the space outside the door into a small square. Inside, the window offers no view beyond layers of snow pressed against the glass; the room feels like a burrow. Bruno’s shelves, books, clothes, and tools give it the character of a lived-in home, but the surrounding accumulation has cut it off from the visible mountain world.

During the night, the mountain interrupts their conversation with a roar that grows close and deafening, shaking glasses on the table. A crash follows; the sounds subside, and the two men understand that an avalanche has passed nearby rather than over the house. They go outside, but darkness gives them no view of what happened. In the morning they see that the main gorge of Grenon has released an avalanche, beginning several hundred meters above at the steepest section. Its descent has scoured earth and gravel from the slope, exposing rock and leaving the gorge like a dark wound. After a fall of about five hundred meters, the avalanche strikes the basin with enough force to break through the lake’s frozen surface. What looked like an uninterrupted field of snow has concealed water, terrain, and a moving mass capable of remaking both.

Bruno’s Disappearance and the Limits of the Record

The snowfall’s consequences continue into March, when Lara tells Pietro that Bruno cannot be found. Bruno’s cousins have gone up to check on him, but no one has cleared snow at Barma for some time. The house has disappeared beneath the accumulation, and even the rock face is barely visible. A helicopter carries rescuers to the site; they dig down to the roof and cut through the tiles, expecting to find Bruno inside, but the house is empty. Recent snowfall has erased tracks around it as well.

The rescue team searches with dogs, and Pietro calls each day for a week, hoping for news. Yet the depth of the snow and the arrival of spring bring a dangerous avalanche season. After twenty-two deaths on Italian mountain slopes that winter, the disappearance of one local man in a deep valley attracts little sustained attention. Lara and Pietro do not insist that the search continue indefinitely. They expect Bruno to be found when the snow thaws, perhaps in a gorge in the middle of summer, with crows discovering him first. When Lara asks whether this is what Bruno wanted, Pietro says it is not, but lies. The answer does not solve the disappearance; it exposes the painful uncertainty that the buried landscape has left behind.

Snow, Memory, and Concealment

The winter’s erasures sharpen the book’s contrast between physical traces and remembered ones. Pietro can make his way through the snow only by recalling the summer route after its landmarks have vanished. Elsewhere, his father’s densely marked mountain map preserves years of journeys in colored lines, and the Grenon summit logbook holds Giovanni Guasti’s 1997 record of climbing from Grana in three hours and fifty-eight minutes. These records make past movement legible; the exceptional snow does the opposite, hiding tracks, structures, and even the lake.

That contrast also gives the snowfall its force beyond weather or hardship. Earlier, Pietro’s father had described a glacier as snow from winters long past, a memory that does not wish to be forgotten. In the winter of 2014, snow is not simply a store of memory: it is an active cover that makes the present difficult to read. Barma’s inscription, made in memory of Giovanni, remains a human attempt to preserve what the mountain cannot guarantee. The snow can bury the house and erase Bruno’s tracks, leaving his fate uncertain even as the people who knew him continue to search and remember.