The Alps

The term alone can conjure up all sorts of images.

Downhill skiing…

Julie Andrews aka Maria von Trapp…

Whistling marmots…

Even views like these…

The thing about A Little Cabin in the Alps is that none of the above apply to it! There are no marmots in the area. Julie Andrews stopped off in Switzerland and never got this far. There is no big downhill ski resort in the valley, and, despite it being “only” 4 days trekking to the base of the Matterhorn (which you can just about see peeking through the clouds in the top left of the photo), the cabin is not in the area of the photo itself.

But the cabin is still in the Alps!

In modern languages the term alp, alm, albe or alpe refers to the grazing pastures in the alpine regions below the glaciers, not the peaks themselves. These high mountain pastures are typically near or above the tree line, where cows and other livestock are taken to be grazed during the summer months and where huts and hay barns can be found, sometimes constituting tiny hamlets. Therefore, the term "the Alps", as a reference to the mountains, is a misnomer... There you have it. All that's from Wikipedia - so it must be true!

The Alpine chain is of course home to hundreds and hundreds of valleys that still practice the transhumance nature referred to above. The Cervo valley is one of them. To make it easier to identify specific regions of the Alpine chain, there is a proposal for a new classification system - International Standardized Mountain Subdivision of the Alps-ISMSA. You can read more about it here.

Without getting into toooo much detail, the bottom line is that the cabin is situated in the Pennine Alps. And within the Pennine Alps, the Biellese Alps is a sub-range where the Cervo valley lies and the highest peak in this sub-range is Mont Mars at 2600m.

Don’t say you weren’t told…!

And I still think it’s a great domain name😅