Fashion on the Trail

            Because everyone hiking the Alta Via 2 has to carry a backpack, no one carries extra clothes. Therefore, everyone is instantly recognizable, day by day, by what they’re wearing, I perhaps most of all because I was the only hiker in a skirt. 

            Wearing my hiking skirt was an excellent choice. It was comfortable to hike in and dried easily overnight when I washed it out. It has great pockets for Kleenex, a small knife, lip balm, and my power rock, a small rock my granddaughter painted with a rainbow and gave to me several years ago. If the weather was cold, I could wear my long underwear (soft merino wool) under it for long pants. 

And other hikers liked it. One man told me (in Italian, but I understood well enough) that that’s the way women used to dress for the trail. He’s right that nineteenth-century women hikers wore skirts, but they were long skirts, whereas mine was short. Still, the concept was the same. The other man told me (again in Italian) that he liked my hiking skirt, and I said something about being “oh, so fashionable,” and he said, “Fantastico!”

            I also carried a long skirt with me to change into at the rifugio. After the long day and the hard hiking, it was a daily pleasure to take a shower (worth the cost, even at five, sometimes six euros – about $5 or $6 – each), and then change into evening wear, even if it was the same skirt every night. One of the English girls hiking the AV 2 told me she wished she had brought a skirt to wear, and I was delighted to see that another young hiker, an American living in Berlin, did wear a skirt, long like mine, every evening.

            However, fashion-wise, I did do one thing wrong. I had read in the guidebook that proper clothing for hiking in the Dolomites was “of violent hues,” but the guidebook I had was over ten years old, and I thought maybe the fashion had changed since then, and I was reluctant to stand out like a sore thumb in bright colors, when everyone else was demure. Bright colors on the trail are not my style. So I forewent the lurid colors.

           But the guidebook was right. Dolomite hikers wear garish hues – bright pink pants, neon chartreuse shirts, flashy red jackets, fluorescent turquoise pants, yellow shirts so bright they practically pulsate. The colors and the combinations of colors were startling. Coming around a turn in the trail and seeing Rifugio Puez in the distance, I was struck by the many dots of colors, like a Pissaro painting, in front of the building. 

The person in front is Mike, who didn't know he was supposed to wear bright colors.

             Then one day I looked at all those hikers in their gaudy colors and looked at my own demure clothes and understood. If any one of those hikers fell down the mountain, he or she would stand out like a sore thumb. 

I, in my gray skirt and shirt, would blend in like another rock. He would be rescued. No one would ever find me.

            All the more reason, I thought, to stay on the trail.