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.