Gran Paradiso; Or, Cow Clashes Of Cogne

I had seen Gran Paradiso, the mountain, a couple times from the Mt. Blanc environs, and wanted to see it closer up. It is Italy's 7th highest and the highest completely within its borders. It is also the hub of a large national park, Parc Nationale Gran Paradiso, originally King Victor Emmanuel's royal hunting grounds, which he gave to the nation (Mussolini) in 1922, ostensibly to provide for the preservation of the nearly-extinct ibex. It is also Italy's first and possibly largest national park. Anyhow, its gateway is Cogne, scarcely an hour from Courmayeur. We drove over on a Sunday afternoon, quickly satisfied my curiosity about the mountain, viewed a local spectacle, stayed overnight in Cogne's large sosta (aire), and then drove the next morning to Lillez, a nearby village, to see its waterfall.

Cogne's big sosta, room for perhaps a hundred campers; fewer
there now at season's end

The Big Mountain from Cogne

Church tower in Cogne, which apparently has
the same affliction as San Capistrano

Cogne is one of those civilized Italian towns
that has an elevator or escalator from the
big sosta or parking lot up to the town proper;
here, we were reminded that Bovine Culture is
Very Big in the Val d'Osta (from which we get
Valdosta, GA, USA, a place no more like
alpine Italy than, say, Mars), a fact that would
be indelibly impressed on us as soon as we
viewed the fields west of the town...

At first we thought we had wandered into a livestock auction

But no, these are the Reines des Alpes, the cow clashes,
the bovine battles of Aosta

With preliminaries in every little town, quarter-finals in bigger
towns, and...well, as you would expect, it's very much like
March Madness or the Super Bowl

Thus; I have a pretty good video of all this which I'll upload
to YouTube and link here; someday, probably not in Italy,
when we have decent internet connections

Reines du Mont Blanc; in the guidebooks it is described as
"humane" 

Last year's losers

Anyhow, the entire affair is fueled by a variety of carburants

Another view of the mountain 

Schist happens

In the geological park in Lillez, next morning; well, para-schist,
the sign said; but the gneiss was nice

Lower bit of the waterfall

Other mountains look on; it was 36 degrees
overnight in Cogne; we felt the need to move
on, further south, lower down...