Alta Via 2: What It Was Like

            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