Achievement!: Alta Via 2, from Plose to Croce d'Aune

            At the end of the twelfth day of hiking the Alta Via 2 in the Dolomites of northern Italy  – all that was left for the next day was a couple of hours’ walk along a road down into the valley – Mike and I and Carina, a woman from Edinburgh who was hiking the AV 2 by herself and who hiked the last day with us, walked into Rifugio G. dal Piaz and took off our packs. We had done it! We hiked approximately 100 miles, up and down, over passes, into valleys and back up into the mountains, hiking mostly in bare-rock Alpine area (between 6000 and 9800 feet) and ascending (and descending) in total 29,530 feet. Exhilaration trumped exhaustion. We told the proprietor at Rifugio dal Piaz that we had just completed AV 2, and he grinned and said did we want to see our rooms first or have a beer first?

            Beer won, hands down. We clinked glasses, our faces beaming. The proprietor brought us each another beer, on the house, in congratulations. We beamed and beamed.

Carina

Mike

Me

            Walking the Alta Via 2 ranks right up there with other achievements of my life: raising my son, building my house, overcoming schizophrenia, being a Marshall Scholar, getting my Ph.D. (at the age of 68) – and walking AV2, from Plose to Rifugio dal Piaz, day after day, up mountains and down, 6, 7, 8, 9 hours a day,

achieving passes (sometimes three in a day), making steep descents – the rock-climbing, the via ferrata (routes aided with iron cables and ladders for vertical climbs or narrow ledges on crumbling mountainsides),

 up steep chimneys, 

across vertical ways – the steepness above the valleys – the razor-edge walks – the dizzying heights – the marmots and chamois – the flowers purple and yellow – the rifugios in rock settings, where supplies had to be brought in by helicopter

 – the impossible passes – each place demanding its own memory but each memory isolated from the whole. At which rifugio? On which day? Up which pass? Which canyon, which magnificent view, which ferrata, which impossible climb, which impossible descent? Pictures, images, memories come in flashes. How can we ever convey the experience? No one would believe it, even if we could. That’s because it was impossible – impossibly steep, impossible to climb that slope, impossible to work that hard and love every minute, a walk that has made us impossibly strong, impossibly fit, impossibly ecstatic.

            I was, as far as I can tell, the oldest person on the trail during these two weeks. Every once in a while, hiking along, I would think, “I’m 72 years old!” – and look what I was doing!

            Okay, so I’m not the oldest person to do this sort of thing or the most fit, nor was the Alta Via 2, difficult, challenging, and wonderful as it was, the ultimate in difficult hiking. A few days ago a friend in Colorado, who is a year older than I, told me he had just climbed Mt. Craig (12,007 feet) in the Rockies, “a great climb but a 26-mile, 11-hour marathon to get there,” a trek that makes my longest day, 13 miles and 9 hours, look easy.

            However, as I remind myself again and again, hiking is not a competitive sport. My achievement is my achievement. What someone else can do is beside the point. It was I who hiked the Alta Via 2 – it was Mike who did it – and it was one of the most exciting, challenging, wonderful experiences of my life. (Of his, too, Mike says.) After thirteen days I didn’t want it to be over. I still wanted to get up every morning, put on my pack, and climb another pass.

            Of course, though, it had to come to an end with the last night, in Rifugio G. Dal Piaz. But the experience is still so vivid that I dream every night that I am on the trail again.