The largest glacier in the Gran Paradise massif is the Tribulation. On the northern face, it is formed in the vast circle that opens under the highest peak at the head of Valnontey. It covers about 600 hectares and extends from an elevation of 4,061 meters to 2,580 meters.
During Victor Emanuel the Second’s epic hunts, this glacier, like all those in the range and all those in the Alps, was much larger. Its front, combined with those of the Grand Croux and Tzasset, dropped to the underlying valley floor, at an elevation just over 2,000 meters. Valnontey’s icy landscape is still one of the most spectacular of the alpine valleys and one can only imagine how magnificent it was in the nineteenth century when the Tribulation ice wall and tributaries touched the thick woods that covered the valley floor!