Courmayeur · Italy

The larches of Perthud

This wood is older than almost everything else in the valley. They are larches, and some have stood here for several centuries: low, contorted trees with thick bark, nothing like the straight larches of a managed forest. They have that shape because nobody ever cut them and because they grow at the limit of what a tree can sustain, where the season lasts three months and the rest of the year is snow. A larch of that age adds a ring a fraction of a millimetre wide each year. The timber that comes from it is extremely hard, which is the reason the huts of these valleys are still standing after three hundred winters. The wood survived because it was inconvenient to reach.

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How do you know they are old?

From the rings, counted on a thin core taken without felling the tree. At this height the rings are so narrow they have to be read under a microscope, which is exactly why alpine larches are one of the best records we have of past climates.

Does a larch lose its needles?

Yes, and it is the only conifer in the Alps that does. In October it turns yellow and then drops everything, which saves it from carrying the weight of snow and from losing water in the months when it cannot take any up. It is why these valleys turn orange in autumn.

Can you walk in the wood?

Yes, the Val Veny paths run through it. It is worth slowing down: these are trees you look at one at a time rather than all at once, and some of them were already large when there was no road at the bottom of this valley.

Where it is

Perthud, Val Veny, 11013 Courmayeur · 45.80765, 6.93099 · Open in Maps

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