There
were beautiful long grassy walks, one downhill under a ski lift, one where marmots
thrust up their heads between boulders, one ambling for miles across an undulation
of steep hillsides where a chamois (a large goat of the Dolomites) appeared on the horizon.
There
was gravel scree, as treacherous as ping-pong balls, so that one of the characteristic
sounds of the Dolomites was the scrunch of a foot sliding down loose rock.
There
was the distant music of cow or sheep bells. Once we walked through a herd of peacefully grazing cows, their bells clanging musically on all sides of us with every nod of a
cow’s head to snatch some grass, and I wondered if that constant ding didn't bother them. Once when we topped a pass, we were met, not
with the pastoral effect of cow bells, but with the decidedly urban roar of race
car engines. Far below us, in Passo Cereda, the San Martino International Rally
was taking place. The rest of the day was haunted with the roaring motors and
obligatory backfiring of race cars, a strange sound to be flung into the
Dolomites.
There
were a few, a very few, glacial streams, with water so clear it could hardly be
seen. There were even fewer pools in those streams, and only one small pool, a
delicate turquoise in color, deep enough to lie in, so I did.
There
were crumbling trails traversing hillsides, so narrow the foot barely had a
purchase, with long iron cables attached to the rock walls to
prevent a tumble hundreds, if not thousands, of feet into the chasms below. “What
do you do?” I asked, “if a group of hikers is coming towards you?” “Kiss,” came
the reply.
There
was steep. “Sometimes steep, sometimes steeper, sometimes steepest,” Mike said.
There
was not inconsiderable danger – of slipping and falling on the scree, of
twisting or breaking an ankle, of an overhanging rock hitting your pack as you
leapt across a chasm and knocking you down the mountain, of getting so tired
you stumbled. At most points a fall would send you over the cliff, but when
Mike did actually tumble off the trail, on the longest descent of the entire
Alta Via 2 (4000 feet in about two and a half miles), he was on what was probably the only
grassy bank on the whole descent. He said that as he fell and rolled down the
bank, he was so tired he would have been happy just to
keep on rolling. On another day, as we were climbing up a rocky pass with some
via ferrata and some free-climbing (when we wished there were some via ferrata!),
I saw a small white plaque on a rock with the names of two Italians, a date,
and the words, “il nostri amici.” When Mike joined me at the top, I told him I was
glad to see him and thank goodness I didn’t have to put up a plaque with his name on it!
There
were vertical walls to climb, when we secured our hiking poles onto our packs, pulled
on gloves, and started up, searching for footholds and handholds, hauling our
bodies up by the iron cable, climbing up (or down) vertical ladders. Looking down, I could see tiny dots of people
walking on the trail below, like cars seen from an airplane.
At
last, the pass ascended, I was in the peaks with the valley unbelievably
distant, and I was, each time, unbelievably ecstatic. That's what it was like
No comments:
Post a Comment