The expedition
The Gobba di Rollin — Dos de Rollin in French — is a broad, ice-covered summit of 3,898–3,899 m in the Pennine Alps south of the Breithorn, on the border between the Aosta Valley and the Swiss Valais. Its flat summit carries the highest ski lift in Europe, the top of the Matterhorn Glacier Paradise summer ski area on the Theodul Glacier between Zermatt and Breuil-Cervinia, linked by lifts to the Klein Matterhorn and the Testa Grigia; the shortest approach on foot is from the Klein Matterhorn station at 3,820 m, less than two kilometres away. On the Italian side a chairlift service track climbs from Cervinia to the Plateau Rosa, and in summer, under ideal conditions, the summit can be reached from the Theodul Pass by four-wheel-drive vehicle.
That is what the Land Rover Club Valle d'Aosta did on 2 August 2000. Three Defender 90s, described as standard off-road vehicles, left Breuil-Cervinia at about 2,000 m and climbed the ski slopes to the Plateau Rosa and the Testa Grigia at 3,480 m, then across the glacier to the arrival station of the Gobba di Rollin lift, which the club and the road-recording site dangerousroads.org put at 3,911 m. The six crew were Nicola Corradi, Vincenzo Marcheselli, Fabio Bich, Marco Corradi, Andrea Bryer and Lucia Montrosset. The climb was claimed as the European altitude record for standard 4x4 vehicles, and Wikipedia's entry for the mountain records that the summit 'has even been reached via the Theodul Pass by 4x4 vehicles, a European record'.
The record stands in a different class from the 1997 Elbrus ascent, which took a heavily modified Defender 90 to 5,621 m with winches over 44 days: the Aosta crews drove unmodified Defenders up a glacier ski area in a day. Permission to drive to the Gobba di Rollin is no longer given; the summit is reached on skis or on foot. No book or film came of the record, and the sources for it are the club's account as repeated by dangerousroads.org and the one-line mention in the mountain's encyclopaedia entry.
