In their application, Next Challenge Grant winners and Zoe and Juliette described themselves as “passionate about hiking as well as sheep”.
They were agricultural engineering students and decided to use their grant money for a 1,000 mile walk across the European alps, interviewing shepherds and shepherdesses on their way.
The Next Challenge Grant is an annual adventure bursary supported by public donations. It is open to anyone, anywhere in the world. Find out more here.
1,000 miles across the Alps interviewing shepherds
by Zoe Mitaut and Juliette Polle
In December 2020, we were at a party with our friends from our agricultural school and we started talking about what we were planning on doing during our gap year in 2021-2022.
We both wanted to spend time in the mountains, doing a thru hike over multiple months. We both had heard about the most famous American thru hikes: the Pacific Crest Trail and the Appalachian Trail but we preferred to stay in Europe in order to avoid taking the plane and to stay as much as possible in the mountains.
Juliette had just heard about the Via Alpina on a podcast, a hiking trail crossing all the Alps in 3-4 months. As we are also both interested in pastoralism and animal breeding in mountainous areas and both had been shepherdesses for a summer, she had the idea to link these two things and suggested that we could cross the Alps by foot on the Via Alpina and meet shepherds and shepherdesses along the way. The Trans’Alpina project was born and, needless to say that we spend the rest of this party talking about it!
After months of preparation, calls with experts and a little bit of training, we were ready to start our hike on the 1 st of June 2022 in Trieste (Italy). Very quickly, we adopted a very pleasant rhythm. The days were similar, especially the couscous for lunch, but each day was different, marked by new encounters and new mountain ranges.
Our big favourite remains the Triglav National Park in Slovenia and the Italian Piedmont. We had the chance to meet shepherds and cowherds, and better understand the reality of these jobs, their daily life, and the traditions that are attached to them. Our idea was to take pictures of their living and working place and talk about their life paths and their working practices.
And after 96 days, 1600 km and 96 000 m of positive elevation, 8 Alpine countries (Slovenia, Austria, Germany, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Italy, France and Monaco) and many kilos of chocolate, we reached the Mediterranean Sea.
Leaving all these beautiful landscapes and these beautiful alpine encounters behind, we had to go back to Montpellier (France) to finish our last year of agricultural engineering school. The next step in the Trans’Alpina project is a traveling photographic exhibition: photos and texts will draw portraits of these men and women, of their work, far from clichés.
The exhibition will be inaugurated at the beginning of 2024. For the moment, we devote ourselves to our studies and our end-of-study internship where we are leaving for a new adventure in Mongolia with nomadic cashmere goat breeders.
We would like to thank again all the people that donated to the grant, it has helped us getting good quality equipment and save our bodies from a heavy backpack !
If you would like to have news of the exhibition and see our journey in pictures, you can find
us on Facebook (@transalpina2022) and Instagram (@trans.alpina2022) where all the
pictures from our adventure are still available !
Juliette and Zoé
