It was a freezing December day when mountain guide Kingsley Jones first saw a rescue monk in action. He was leading a small group up the ominously named Combe des Morts when he passed by a rescue hut – one of many that dot this avalanche-prone area – and noticed a woman inside struggling in the freezing cold. He offered his assistance and she told him she’d already phoned for help. And it soon arrived, in the form of an Augustine monk – on skis, equipped with a hot flask of grenadine and warm layers, who escorted her to the safety of nearby Hospice du Grand St Bernard, a monastery and travellers’ hostel on Col du Mont-Joux at 2,473m.
This kind of rescue has taken place in the mountain passes around Col du St Bernard on the Swiss-Italian border since 1050. And despite the changes in outdoor gear, modes of rescue and avalanche locator technology over the centuries, the hospice (set up by St Bernard of Aosta to offer refuge to pilgrims walking the Via Francigena pilgrim path from Canterbury to Rome) has remained largely unchanged.
The day I head there was free of rescue drama, though freezing cold at around -20C. My friend Dan and I had hired a car from Geneva and left it in the Super St Bernard car park just before Italian customs. It wasn’t my first time here in winter – that had been over a decade earlier, with a group and guide like Kingsley. But this time – having done more snowshoeing and winter skills courses in the interim, and with our own transceivers and snow shovels and after checking avalanche conditions – we set off for the hospice alone.
Two years ago, I came here in summer, too, and found the roads (now plastered in thick sparkling snow) filled with coachloads of tourists. Yet for seven months of the year (from November to May) only skiers or snowshoers are able to visit, and the atmosphere out on the mountains and inside the hospice is transformed into a silent place of contemplation.
The Combe des Morts was so named because of the high risk of avalanche, and why Bernard of Menthon set up the monastery here – with the doors always open for those in need seeking shelter.
On the day Dan and I set out, it was sunny with little wind, and we moved fast. Before long, we passed the rescue hut where a ceramic sign attached to the stone walls reads: “St Bernard guide nos pas”.
Bernard died in 1081, and in 1681 was canonised, becoming the patron saint of mountaineers. After our three-mile walk in, the white walls of the hospice appeared, a statue of St Bernard alongside, with the devil shackled in chains at his feet – representing the mastering of perils that Alpinists face.
Kingsley has been leading trips to the hospice for more than 25 years with Icicle Mountaineering, based in the Lake District, and before my trip he told me that the type of people coming has changed during that time.
“It used to only be skiers – mainly Swiss and older people,” he said. “But then snowshoers started coming, the crowds slowly got younger too, with many between 20 and 30. Now even some families make the journey and the North Americans seem to have heard about it as well.”
While many used to view the hostel as a functional base from which to climb nearby Mount Fourchon and the surrounding peaks, today it’s the spiritual aspect of it that seems to appeal to most, Kingsley said: “Going in through that hospice door, walking past the rescue sledges still used as they would have been in the 11th century, is incredibly atmospheric and appeals to a large cross section of people.”
When Dan and I arrived there was already a party of Swiss ski-mountaineers sipping sweet tea, pouring over maps, a group of Britons with a guide, and a lady and her partner from the US (the hostel sleeps about 80 across two floors). Three resident monks (known as canons) are here during the winter, as well as a handful of lay volunteers. I chat to one, Pascal, in his mid-20s and from France, who came here for some time out to think about what to do next with his life.
After a meal of hot soup followed by a simple serving of meat and two veg, it was time for mass. As a non-religious soul, I wouldn’t normally sit through it, but up here, held in a simple, stone underground crypt with thick walls offering protection from the snowstorm building outside, I couldn’t resist. With only schoolgirl French, I didn’t understand most of what was said, but the softly spoken words and monks’ song were incredibly soothing. Afterwards, I headed straight to my dorm, cocooning myself in the thick blankets and notice how little things have changed since my last visit.
The next day, after we’d wandered to the Col Ouest de Barasson and back to peer down from Switzerland into Italy, Pascal showed us the onsite food stores with giant truckles of local cheese and wine (Napoleon and his men are said to have drunk more than 22,000 bottles of it in 1800 – racking up a bill that was only paid in 1984 by then French president François Mitterrand). Afterwards, one of the monks led us to the attic where a small museum charts the history of the building and it’s even more famous former residents – the St Bernard rescue dogs.
Bred here since at least the early 1700s (when records began), the dogs were adept at sniffing out people buried in avalanches and their image has found its way into books, paintings and cartoons. With the advent of thermal imaging cameras and helicopters, these 70kg residents became superfluous and too expensive to keep here, but they still have a home down the mountain in Martigny at Barryland – a breeding kennels and visitors centre – and get to come back to visit every summer and meet the many tourists. In winter, the only specimen is a stuffed St Bernard from 1800, which is said to have saved more than 40 lives.
On the final morning it’s a wrench to leave. I’ve spent as long reading by the window and watching the snow fall, as I have hiking, and I feel strangely refreshed.
As we walk back through the snow, I recall a line from St Bernard’s prayer: “After having enjoyed the beauty of nature, we return to our duty more cheerful and stronger.” Having spent a comfortable weekend in this frozen wonderland, surrounded by history, mountain lovers and rescue monks, I don’t need to be a Catholic to say “Amen” to that.
Icicle offers a guided three-day/two-night snowshoeing to Grand St Bernard Hopsice experience from £549pp. Phoebe Smith is author of Wayfarer: Love, Loss and Life on Britain’s Ancient Paths, available from the Guardian Bookshop and shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Book of the Year 2025
