‘The hike of a lifetime’ – a circuit of the Écrins national park in France

The Tour des Écrins in the Hautes-Alpes is one of Europe’s finest long-distance walks, and offers a chance to reflect on how best to live alongside nature

I first learned about the Écrins national park in relation to a specific nature reserve within it. The réserve intégrale du Lauvitel was established in 1995 to “monitor the natural dynamics of ecosystems” with all human influence removed. This so-called wilderness area was one of the first of its kind in Europe.

A video showed an ecologist rowing across a dazzling, teal-hued lake surrounded by pine-strewn peaks. I was immediately fascinated. Admittedly, a forbidden zone taps into plenty of childhood adventure fantasies, but it’s also a bold statutory move a world apart from our more modest environmental experiments in the UK. Yet fortress conservation begs difficult questions: are humans a part of nature, or apart from it?