Watching the trees

     I am generally a pretty even-keeled person. There's not a lot that storms my boat.

    But watching trees die distresses me no end. It's happening all over Southern Oregon and is especially noticeable in our Ponderosa pines. Everywhere, Ponderosas are turning brown. It's true that the pines lose needles at this time of year, anyway, but what I'm seeing goes beyond the normal cycle. The trees are dying. I wring my hands; I lament; I wail, and the trees turn browner and browner. Some are already but trunks and branches. I weep for the trees.

    I have a beautiful Ponderosa in front of my house. In winter frost etches the needles in silver. The sun sets every needle, every limb a-glimmer. In summer the sun slides behind the tree, shading the deck where I'm eating my lunch. The tree is the tallest in the view from my house, towering over the California live oak and apple tree in front of it and the madrone beside it. I have loved this tree for years. Its needles are browning, slowly, but there's still a chance it will live, given rain. But day after day goes by this October, and the sky is blue nd cloudless and the weather is warm.

    Caterpillars have invaded the madrone beside the pine. At first there was one nest on one branch; now four or five branches are webbed with nests. The tree looks weak, stressed.

    I have numerous California live oaks around my house, a species I don't see often in other places, much less at other homes. They are thick-leaved, sturdy trees and were seemingly invulnerable. Now, however, for the first time since I have lived on this mountainside, the leaves are turning brown. Oh, that just doesn't happen to these trees! I am so distressed.

   The trees on Humpy Mountain, my immediate view, seem dry and pale, even at that distance. 

    I have six or eight dead firs and pines close to my house that need to be taken down. Other neighbors and friends have talked about cutting down dead trees on their property.

    Drought. Climate change. 

    It distresses me beyond words, but all I can do is watch it happen, pray for rain (in my own way), and wish with all my heart that things would get better.

Hiking the Alta Via 1: Day 10, Second Half

From the rest stop at Rifugio Pian de Fontana to trail's end at La Pissa bus stop

    The original plan, last February, when we were planning this trip, was to take the exciting via ferrata route from Rifugio Pramparet and stay the last night at Rifugio Septimo Alpini before hiking out the next day. However, once we got to Italy and looked more closely at our material, we saw that hikers on this route had to have climbing gear and a guide. We tried to hire a guide and rent the gear, but in the end it was all too complicated and entailed too much extra hiking to try to meet the guide, so we gave up the effort and changed our plans to stay at Rifugio Pramparet the last night and do the long hike out on the last day. Yesterday's post gave a rendition of the first half of that last day. Now, at half-past noon, we were on the last leg of our hike on the Alta Via 1, from Rifugio Pian de Fontana to La Pissa bus stop, where we were to meet Bryan in his rented car.

Just setting off from Rif. Pian de Fontana. Photo by unknown stranger

    At first the downhill sloped gently across the steepness of the mountain. The vistas were open and stunningly beautiful.

                                                                        Photo by William della Santina

William was hiking fast, at his own pace at last, maybe already thinking about leaving for college the day after he got home. He was soon out of sight. Though Margaret could easily have been hiking with him, she stayed behind me. It was very kind; otherwise I would have been hiking by myself all day. (But, then, Margaret is a kind person.) 

William on the trail. Photo by Margaret Della Santina

    At one point on that long, gradual descent across the steep, open, grassy mountainside, we came across a little trailside box with a statue of St. Anthony of Padua, the saint of lost things. Margaret surmised that it was there for the shepherds to pray for the sheep that had fallen off the trail and were lost. It was easy to see how that could happen, the sheep rolling over and over down the steep, open hill with nothing to stop it.  

    Not much farther down the trail we passed a young hiker who had stopped for a rest. She was from Cincinnati and was hiking the Dolomites by herself—and in sandals. We went on by, but she soon passed us, going at a fast clip, and then passed William where he was waiting for us, and we never saw her again.

    William was waiting on a large boulder at a turn in the trail. I think he had taken a good long nap while he waited. I stopped there to put an elastic bandage on my ankle, which was feeling weak.

    And then on down.

    Forever down. 

    Rock trail, root trail, clamber trail. Down and down. Finally we were at the last rifugio on the Alta Via 1, Rifugio Bianchet, which, like Pian de Fontana, looked pretty deserted. I took off my boots for our 15-minute break, then put them back on for our final descent.

    Now we were on a gravel road,

Going down the last road. Photo by Margaret dell Santina

which descended gently at first, much to the relief of my feet, but then it got steeper. Steep short-cut trails through the woods cut off some of the switchbacks of the road. Everything went down. My feet were hurting so badly by now they were affecting my pace. I simply could not walk any faster, no matter how late we were. The ace bandage had steadied my ankle, but the toes, the toes, the toes! The pounding on the bottoms of my feet. How my feet hurt! And the more they hurt, the slower I walked. There was no help for it. I could keep on going, but I couldn't go faster.

    I distracted myself by taking note of the beautiful landscape—the green-leaf trees, the perpendicular stone cliffs, the plunging river canyon. After the thousands of feet we had descended from the high country, how could there possibly still be such sheer drops hundreds of feet down?

    With only a mile or half-mile to go, the trail left the road completely and dashed impatiently down the hillside. By the time I stumbled down the last rock-and-root bit and joined William at the road—Margaret immediately behind me—it was 6:00, and we were an hour late. There was no bus stop and no Bryan and lots of whizzing traffic. I set my pack on the pavement, sat down on it, took off my boots, and stretched out my legs. Oh, the relief to my feet! Then I joined the consultation about what to do. 

    Finally William decided to brave the traffic and walk up the road, where he discovered the bus stop, which was only a wide place in the road. Bryan wasn't there. William came back to us and, on a miraculously functioning phone, contacted his dad and sent the coordinates of where we were. Then he, too, got off his feet while we waited.

                                                                        Photo by Margaret Della Santina

Twenty minutes later Bryan pulled up in his rented car.

    In 2016 Mike and I ended our hike on the Alta Via 2 at the last rifugio. It had been a hard last two days,—11 or 12 miles each day, with several climbs up very steep, long passes—but when we got to the rifugio, exhilaration trumped exhaustion. We did it! We hiked the Alta Via 2! In congratulations the owner gave us a beer on the house. The next morning we made a short, easy hike to the bus stop still in the glow of our achievement.

    Now, at the end of the AV 1, I felt no exhilaration, only relief to be able to take off my boots. On this last day we had hiked 10.6 miles, climbing 3000 feet and descending an amazing 7,700 feet. We had been on the trail for nine and a half hours and on our feet, walking, for eight and a half hours. My feet were telling me that that was enough. 

    And then when we got in the car with Bryan, there was so much to tell that somehow it didn't get told. And then we were in Treviso for the next three days, in a different kind of adventure, experiencing Italian cities, eating in outdoor restaurants, seeing churches, walking through streets.

                                                                                Photo by Bryan della Santina

The Alta Via 1 was tucked away in my memory somewhere, inaccessible, remote. 

    Finally, at home, rereading my journal and writing these blog posts, I began to retrieve the trip from my memory. The glorious mountain vistas. The steep climbs. The rifugios. The people we met. The challenges we faced and the joy of facing them. The strength of the body. The willingness of the feet to step into boots every morning, no matter how much they had hurt the night before. What great hiking partners Margaret and William were. How grateful I am to have been able to hike the Alta Via 1 with them.  How much I love the Dolomites. 

Hiking the Alta Via 1: Day 10, First Half

From breakfast till noon: Rifugio Pramparet to a rest stop at Rifugio Pian di Fontana

     Anxious about the long day ahead, I was ready to eat breakfast and leave our rifugio long before breakfast was served. I sat at an outdoor table and read from my Kindle while the rough-looking climbers were milling about, putting on gear. To my delight, the black-and-white cat from yesterday's walk jumped into my lap and stayed there till breakfast was called.

                                                Photo by William della Santina

    We left immediately after breakfast, retracing our steps to the trail junction, and then starting the third of my favorite climbs. (The other two were the long steep climb to Lagazuoi on Day 3 and the steady switchbacks on the mule road to Rifugio Coldai on Day 6—oh, but I should probably include the rocky climb to the clouds of Nuvolau, too.) Today we were going up and up, not with switchbacks but on an angled, upward trail, mostly rock, across a mountainside,

Margaret coming up.                     Photo by William della Santina

then more steeply up an open-faced mountain slope, and, finally, at the top of that, up a very narrow spine, hand over hand, no poles. I followed William up, lickety-split, no problem. It was superb.

    Or that's the way I saw it. William and I waited at the plateau while Margaret and the man with the camera equipment, whom I mentioned on Day 5, waited a long time at the top of the climb for his wife. (On Day 5 I commented about the way he apparently ignored his wife, who, we found out later, was a having a hard time because she was afraid of heights—in the Dolomites, of all things!) When the man's wife finally appeared, he gave her a high-five and then a kiss.

                                                                            Photo by Margaret Della Santina

I decided he wasn't mean to her, after all, and that I shouldn't make judgements about people when I don't know their circumstances. And I was impressed with this woman for hiking in these steep mountains when she suffers from acrophobia and especially for making the narrow-rimmed climb she had just done.

    Somewhere before that tricky climb, somewhere on an upward, rocky part of the trail, I spied a rock I wanted to take home in honor of Mike. From every trail where I've scattered his ashes—the AV 1 is the 59th place—I have tried to bring home a rock. (Sometimes, for instance, on a cross-country ski trail in the snow, it was impossible to find a rock.) Those rocks outline my Zen garden. The one from today's trail was maybe too heavy to be practical, but it was beautiful, and it went in my pack.

                                                                             Photo by Margaret Della Santina

    After the hand-over-hand pull up the spine, the trail was still climbing, amazingly enough. Then it started dipping—steeply. Then more steeply, through grass-and-scree hills. Suddenly William cried, "Chamois!" I looked up to see a large herd of these goats of the Dolomites, grazing not on the grassy part of the hill but in the scree. We counted eight of them, spread across the hillside. We were close enough to see them well—how large they were, their dun or darker brown coats. Since chamois are supposedly shy, it was thrilling to see so many at once and for as long as we wanted.

    At the top of the next short rise we saw a sign, the only one of its kind on the Alta Via 1: "Warning. Steep and dangerous descent." I wondered what the people who posted the warning thought anyone would do at that point, since there wasn't really any alternative except to go down. So, okay, down we went.

    The sign wasn't wrong. This was the "long difficult descent" we had decided, wisely, to avoid at the end of a long day yesterday by staying at Rifugio Pramparet instead of at Rifugio Pian di Fontana, which we could see, minuscule with distance, on a small flat, grassy spot at the bottom not of the mountain but at least of this long, long, unbelievably steep hike. In a couple of places there was cable for us to hold onto—via ferrata—to keep us from falling off the cliff.

Me, then William, on the via ferrata. Photo by Margaret della Santina

I was thanking our good sense for not putting this difficult trail at the end of a long, long day, as in our original itinerary.

    By the time we got to Pian di Fontana, my feet were aching for relief. I sat down on a rock wall and took off my boots for the duration of our half-hour rest stop, strictly timed, because for the first time on our hike, we were on a time schedule, as we were to meet Bryan at the trail's end between 4:00 and 5:00. We were already behind schedule. but, we agreed, we needed to take a half-hour break.

    After we had been at so many rifugios bustling with people, Pian di Fontana seemed almost deserted.

                                                                            Photo by William della Santina
Margaret and me almost the only hikers at Pian de Fontana

I saw a couple of men who seemed to belong there, and a woman walked by with a bucket and mop. One lone hiker was eating lunch on the porch. More would come by dinnertime, but at the moment the rifugio was eerily devoid of people.

    After thirty minutes, my feet had to go back in their boots, and we set off again, William first, then me, then Margaret, as we had hiked for the past two days.

    

Hiking the Alta Via 1: Day 9

Rifugio Duran to Rifugio Pramparet. 5 hours,

    Breakfast at Rifugio Duran, served at 6:30, was unusual in that it wasn't a buffet but was served to us by the cheerful young student who had given us his room. We were on the trail by 7:40, our clean, dry clothes tucked into our backpacks.

    After a short downhill stretch on the paved road, we started uphill through the woods, where we were enraptured by many colorful mushrooms.

    We also passed some ruins of World War 1 barracks. The walls were partially crumbled, and plants grew in the dirt floors. The stonework was beautiful. It might not have been so great a place to live during the war, but like Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, the ruins elicited nostalgia for the past even though the specific past for these specific ruins was not a time to be nostalgic for. It wasn't the history that created the mood—not the one-time use of the building—but the general lament that ruins inevitably evoke. 

                         Photo by Margaret Della Santina

    Maybe just as inevitably, the ruins precipitated a conversation about concepts of time. Eastern traditions, William, who has traveled in China, pointed out, consider time as circular, not linear, as we see it. In Anglo-Saxon England, I told him, the concept of time was neither linear nor circular but simultaneous. In an Old English poem called "The Ruin," the poet muses on the ruins of Roman structures in the city that once was Bath (and is again). The poet sees the past Roman times and the future apocalyptic times simultaneously present in present time. And whereas I was peopling the rock-wall rooms of the barracks with the ghosts of World War I soldiers, that poet was peopling the ruins in Bath with very Anglo-Saxon-like people not because he couldn't imagine that Roman people were different but because Roman times and Anglo-Saxon times were, in his way of seeing time, all one.

    We continued up the mountain, conscious, given the culture we live in, mostly of the present moment.

    At the top of one ascent that Gillian Price more or less accurately calls a "modest climb," in a spot of stupendous scenery, we asked a young German man resting there with his two companions to take a picture of us with the Applegater, our community newspaper back in Oregon that has a page dedicated to pictures of people reading the Applegater in distant places. He obliged us cheerfully, but to my disappointment he didn't express curiosity about the Applegater or the Applegate.

                                                                                        Photo by unknown hiker

    We arrived at Rifugio Pramparet in time for what would have been a late lunch, and a welcomed one, since we had had only a few bites of energy bars since breakfast, but this rifugio, old and very isolated from "civilization," didn't accept credit cards, so we had to pay for our new reservations in cash. Alas, there weren't enough euros let over for a beer and a strudel, much less for lunch for a teen-age boy. We just ate another energy bar, drank water, and ruminated on the big jar of pine cones marinating in spirits on the table in the sun, a local eau de vie. William, Margaret, and I took a casual walk down the trail and met a beautiful black-and-white cat on her way back to the rifugio. Later, I spotted a chair carved from a tree stump below the rifugio deck and walked down to investigate. As you can see in the photo, I was wearing the dress I put on every afternoon after a shower. It was extra weight in my pack, but I loved the feeling of wearing a dress after being on the trail.

                                                             Photo by William della Santina

    Pramparet is a beautiful old rifugio, part stone, very different from the upscale, comfortable rifugios such as Vazzoler or Staulanza. 

     Rifugio Vaxxoler                                    Photo by Margaret Della Santina

Accommodations were rougher. Rooms were down a stone walkway, as at cheap motels in the United States.

                                                                            Photo by William della Santina
Dormitory rooms are on the left, dining room on the right.

Our room had four bunk beds, so we wouldn't be the only occupants tonight. The two toilets were down the walkway (to the left of the angle between buildings in the picture), attached to the main building, where the kitchen, bar, and dining room were. There was no "men/women" designation to the toilets, and the sinks were on the other side of the stalls, so inevitably I ran into a man in the bathroom. The showers weren't working. 

    The dining room tables seated ten or twelve people to a table, except for one, which seated six, where Margaret, William, and I ate with a strong Italian girl with gobs of red hair, and with a young Spanish couple from Barcelona, Sara and Javier, who now live in Berlin, where she works for an NGO and he does tech for a non-profit. They were delightful company. I especially liked Sara, who was dark-haired-pretty and lively as a squirrel. Her eyes grew wide when I said I was a writer, although she could have been just as impressed with Margaret's literary and scholarly output. Sara and Javier had to catch a bus to Venice after they walked out tomorrow, so they were planning to leave at 6:00 am. The rifugio people were going to prepare a sack breakfast for them and leave it by their door.

    Also staying at Rifugio Pramparet was a large group of big, tough-looking men. They were climbers, not hikers. I was relieved that none of them stayed in our room. We certainly had bunkmates, but I went to sleep so soon after dinner and was up so early I don't even know who they were.