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.