Hiking Cultures

(This post will be published in the Jefferson Journal in November 2016.)

           Somewhere along the 100 miles of the Alta Via 2 trail that I hiked, with my friend Mike Kohn, in Italy’s Dolomite Mountains last September, someone asked us to describe the most beautiful place we had seen on the trail. I was at a loss to answer, but Mike thought immediately of a summit along the trail just before a descent to the Lago di Fedaia at the foot of Marmolada, the highest mountain in the Dolomites. It was at least an appropriate answer, being one of a number of most beautiful places.

 

            Someone else asked if we could name the most challenging part of the trail. Certainly just about any of the vie ferrate – the “iron routes,” with their cables and ladders and iron bars to aid climbs up (or down) vertical chimneys or along the narrow, crumbling ledge of a trail – would answer, though the most exhausting hike was a two-mile, 4000-foot descent.

            If someone had asked me what I found most surprising, I would not have said how beautiful or challenging the hike was, or how long it was or how welcome the food at the rifugios, but how many trails crisscross the Dolomites and the numbers of people walking on them. Trails run around every mountain bend, zigzagging up hills so steep you would think no one would be crazy enough to take them, yet hikers were everywhere – strong young people, families with children, robust senior citizens, people who came out to climb an impossibly steep pass to a small hut for lunch or to take a trail that included some dangerous via ferrata or that took hours of sweat and muscle. In many cases the trail was at least one day’s journey from any rifugio that was at least another day’s journey from a road where the hiker might have started. The rifugios, especially in the first week, were crowded, for lunch if not always for the night.

            On the second day of our hike, at the bottom of our first significant pass, Mike and I gaped in disbelief at the long line of people going up it. The people towards the top were visible only as a winding whiplash of tiny variously colored dots. On another day, I had to wait at a bit of via ferrata to let some descending hikers go first. Behind them came others, then others, then others, until at last I broke into the line and started up, making the descending hikers wait. On another day, Mike and I met streams of people going up the side of the mountain we were now going down. One hiker stopped for a moment to say, in his German accent, “It’s lighter going down.” He meant “easier,” but I think he was right with “lighter,” too.

            So many people doing such strenuous hiking! I was enormously impressed. I thought about all the hiking Mike and I had done in the Siskiyous and Cascades to prepare for the Dolomites – Sky Lakes, Siskiyou, and Marble Mountain wildernesses, numerous Applegate trails, Grizzly Peak, Soda Mountain, Table Rock, Mt. Elijah to Oregon Caves. Most of the time we didn’t see another person. In a way, I prefer that, wanting my hiking experience to be a wilderness experience, but there was something so heartening about seeing so many people in the gorgeous country of the Dolomites, exerting themselves so boisterously and enjoying both the exercise and the incomparable landscape, that I envied the country its hiking culture.

            We could have that here. We have the natural beauty and the trails. We already have a large number of hikers. All it takes, I think, is a determination to make non-motorized recreation a priority. Although the trails here are not as crowded as in the Dolomites, I feel the emergence of a hiking culture here, too. Think about the popularity of the Pacific Crest Trail, which we are lucky enough to have in our back yard. Five thousand people started at the Mexican border this summer with the intent of hiking the PCT to Canada. Think about the crowds of hikers on Table Rock in May for wildflower viewing. Think about the proposed Jack-Ash and Applegate Ridge trails between Ashland and Grants Pass.

            When I told someone, with great enthusiasm, that when the Jack-Ash and ART trails are built, we will be able to walk from Ashland to Grants Pass, she said, “But why would we want to?”

            Why did all those people want to climb those impossible passes in the Dolomites? Why did I walk the entire Alta Via 2? Why do we have such smiles on our faces as the sweat flies and the legs ache? Places that have a hiking culture don’t need to ask. We know why.

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

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.

A Moment of Despair on the Trail

            At the end of the second day of the thirteen days of hiking the Alta Via 2 in the Dolomites, I was beginning to feel a strain in the Achilles tendon of my left foot. (Tendonitis, I learned later.) Mike and I were almost at the rifugio where we would stay the night, so I figured that after resting the foot a night, I would be able to continue as normal.

            It was a false assumption. After only half an hour on the trail the next morning, I began to feel the same pain, rapidly worsening. My heart dropped, but I kept on walking. Suddenly I was paralyzed with pain. It was obvious I couldn’t take another step on that foot without doing some serious damage to it.

            I cried real tears. Not three days in, and it was over already. I was so mad, so disappointed! Mike hugged me and reminded me that we had said from the beginning that if for any reason we had to stop, we would just go back to Venice and find other things to do. Venice wasn’t such a bad alternative.

            But I wanted to hike the Alta Via 2! I wanted to walk the whole thing. I hated my feet. In addition to hallux rigidus, bunions, Morton’s neuroma, and a bone spur, did I have to have another foot problem to keep me from walking? “I want new feet!” I wailed.

            Then I stopped crying and tried to figure out what to do. The problem, I thought, was that my boot wasn’t giving enough support to my ankle, since I lace my boots very loosely so they won’t put pressure on the bone spur on my left foot or the Morton’s neuroma on my right foot. But too loose a boot can cause problems, too.

            “I wish I had brought an Ace bandage,” I said ruefully.

            “I brought one,” Mike said and fumbled around in his pack, found it, and gave it to me.

            As I was bandaging my ankle, the young American couple from Berlin we had met a few nights earlier came up the hill. When I explained what the problem was, Ashlie said she wished she had some Ibuprofen to give me.

            “What a good idea!” I said. “I have some.”

            So I bandaged my foot, tied my boot tighter, took an Ibuprofen, and set off again, feeling like an athlete: bandage up, dope up, and keep on going. 

              The first pass of the day looked tough, but in fact Mike and I both went up without stopping and got to the top without difficulty. There was a crucified Christ on a small cross at the top. Mike said I should prostrate myself before it and ask forgiveness and repent so Jesus would heal my heel.

 

            I wrapped my ankle with an Ace bandage every morning and played the looser-or-tighter game with my boots and had no more than the usual problems with my feet. That is to say, every so often the boinging pain of the bone spur would make me stop and take my boot off. Usually I could put the boot back on and continue after a few minutes, though twice I opted to hike barefooted for a while rather than put the boot back on. 

Nothing ever stopped me again, and at the end of the hike I thanked my feet profusely for taking me on that whole long marvelous journey. After that one moment of despair on the trail, they got me to a rifugio every night, took me up every pass and down the other side, walked over gravel and stones and grass, walked mile after mile, day after day, and, finally, settled under my seat on the airplane, where for ten hours they could rest without shoes.

Achievement!: Alta Via 2, from Plose to Croce d'Aune

            At the end of the twelfth day of hiking the Alta Via 2 in the Dolomites of northern Italy  – all that was left for the next day was a couple of hours’ walk along a road down into the valley – Mike and I and Carina, a woman from Edinburgh who was hiking the AV 2 by herself and who hiked the last day with us, walked into Rifugio G. dal Piaz and took off our packs. We had done it! We hiked approximately 100 miles, up and down, over passes, into valleys and back up into the mountains, hiking mostly in bare-rock Alpine area (between 6000 and 9800 feet) and ascending (and descending) in total 29,530 feet. Exhilaration trumped exhaustion. We told the proprietor at Rifugio dal Piaz that we had just completed AV 2, and he grinned and said did we want to see our rooms first or have a beer first?

            Beer won, hands down. We clinked glasses, our faces beaming. The proprietor brought us each another beer, on the house, in congratulations. We beamed and beamed.

Carina

Mike

Me

            Walking the Alta Via 2 ranks right up there with other achievements of my life: raising my son, building my house, overcoming schizophrenia, being a Marshall Scholar, getting my Ph.D. (at the age of 68) – and walking AV2, from Plose to Rifugio dal Piaz, day after day, up mountains and down, 6, 7, 8, 9 hours a day,

achieving passes (sometimes three in a day), making steep descents – the rock-climbing, the via ferrata (routes aided with iron cables and ladders for vertical climbs or narrow ledges on crumbling mountainsides),

 up steep chimneys, 

across vertical ways – the steepness above the valleys – the razor-edge walks – the dizzying heights – the marmots and chamois – the flowers purple and yellow – the rifugios in rock settings, where supplies had to be brought in by helicopter

 – the impossible passes – each place demanding its own memory but each memory isolated from the whole. At which rifugio? On which day? Up which pass? Which canyon, which magnificent view, which ferrata, which impossible climb, which impossible descent? Pictures, images, memories come in flashes. How can we ever convey the experience? No one would believe it, even if we could. That’s because it was impossible – impossibly steep, impossible to climb that slope, impossible to work that hard and love every minute, a walk that has made us impossibly strong, impossibly fit, impossibly ecstatic.

            I was, as far as I can tell, the oldest person on the trail during these two weeks. Every once in a while, hiking along, I would think, “I’m 72 years old!” – and look what I was doing!

            Okay, so I’m not the oldest person to do this sort of thing or the most fit, nor was the Alta Via 2, difficult, challenging, and wonderful as it was, the ultimate in difficult hiking. A few days ago a friend in Colorado, who is a year older than I, told me he had just climbed Mt. Craig (12,007 feet) in the Rockies, “a great climb but a 26-mile, 11-hour marathon to get there,” a trek that makes my longest day, 13 miles and 9 hours, look easy.

            However, as I remind myself again and again, hiking is not a competitive sport. My achievement is my achievement. What someone else can do is beside the point. It was I who hiked the Alta Via 2 – it was Mike who did it – and it was one of the most exciting, challenging, wonderful experiences of my life. (Of his, too, Mike says.) After thirteen days I didn’t want it to be over. I still wanted to get up every morning, put on my pack, and climb another pass.

            Of course, though, it had to come to an end with the last night, in Rifugio G. Dal Piaz. But the experience is still so vivid that I dream every night that I am on the trail again. 

Preparing for the Dolomites

      Last spring, after I had already planned to hike the Alta Via 2 trail in the Dolomite Mountains of northern Italy with my friend Mike in September, I heard of friends of friends who go to the Dolomites every summer. They train rigorously - 100 miles on their bikes one day, another 100 the next day. 

     Uh-oh, I thought. If I'm going to be able to do this, I had better get ready. I had better start training.

     Mile and I had already hiked along the Oregon coast in April and had done the Boy Scout Tree Trail in the redwoods. We had made an off-trail hike on the flagged route of what will be the East ART in the Applegate. But now we intensified the activity.
    In May we hiked Bald Mountain above the Little Applegate, then the E ART again, and Mule Mountain. The next week we did the Elliott Ridge Trail (see post on 6/19), and in the next three weeks we hiked six trails, culminating in the Cameron Meadows-Frog Pond loop in the Red Buttes, a hike of seven miles up the mountain and down again, and, three days later, a day hike to Oregon Caves and back, up and over Mt. Elijah, a total of about fourteen miles, with a stop in the chalet for a milk shake before the return.

     The next week we climbed Mt. Elijah again, then did five more trails (Clover Lake and the Harriet Lake overlook in Mountain Lakes Wilderness; Grayback Mountain just above my house; Mt. Scott, Cleetwood Cove, and part of the Rim Trail, all at Crater Lake National Park - see posts on August 11 and 4). The last weekend of July we did a three-day backpacking trip to Island Lake in the Siskiyou Wilderness Area, seven and a half steep miles up to Island Lake, and, the next day cross-country to the top of Jeremiah Mountain. In the meantime I had hiked Dolason Prairie Trail in Redwood National Park (posted on July 28) and for three days in the Russian Wilderness with another friend and had gone up Grayback again with out-of-town visitors. 

     By that time I was feeling pretty strong. But there could be no slacking! We did a short hike on the Pacific Crest Trail at Soda Mountain and then four days later the 15-mile Cook and Green/Horse Trail loop, stopping at Echo Lake for a swim on the way down. Three days later we left for the Marble Mountain Wilderness, where we camped at misnamed Paradise Lake, which was so unswimmable I immediately suggested we hike another two or two and a half miles to Bear Lake, which, to Mike's great relief, I pronounced swimmable and in which I had a good long swim. The next day we hiked eight miles to Shadow Lake, which was even better than Bear Lake, and got there at 2:00 so figured we had time to hike four miles to the top of the Marble Rim - and four miles back, of course, for a total of sixteen miles that day, but it was fantastically beautiful to be on the rim, more than a thousand vertical feet above the valley, and in the midst of all that white marble.

     We had scheduled one last hike before leaving for Italy, but by this time I was daring the Dolomites to throw anything they wanted at me. I felt like I could do anything, including hiking six miles in 100 degree heat. Therefore it seemed unnecessary to actually do it, so I suggested we go to a movie instead.

     In fourteen weeks Mike and I had done twenty-two hikes, of varying steepness and length. I feel as prepared as I can possibly be. When I look at YouTube videos of Alta Via 2, I quake a bit at what might lie ahead, but could it be any more difficult than what I've done this summer? If it's steep, I've done it. If it's long, I've done that, too. I've hiked with a pack twice as heavy as the one I'll be carrying in the Dolomites. Standing on the edge of the Marble Rim could not have induced any less vertigo than I'll experience on the Dolomites. 

      When I get to the Dolomites and talk with other hikers at the rifugios, I'll say, "You want some real challenges? Come to the Siskiyous, and see how they test your mettle!"

What Difference Does a Dress Make?

            I recently wore, to a garden wedding, a long dress made from a light, ethereal fabric of soft greens and blues. 

At the ceremony I noticed the cute, cute dress my friend Haley was wearing, zebra-striped (if zebras were dark purple), knee-length, and close-fitting. Later, during the dancing, I saw that she was wearing a different dress and said, in surprise, “Haley, you changed clothes!” She said that the other dress was uncomfortable on her but, oh, it would probably fit me, did I want it, it was in her car, let’s go look at it.

            It was not only a cute dress but a very unusual one with a top-to-bottom zipper on the side and an Ivanka Trump tag on it. Could I bring myself to wear an Ivanka Trump dress? Somehow the idea of an Ivanka Trump dress on me, of all people, seemed to be a joke on her – she would be appalled. I wasn’t the sort of person she had in mind when she designed the dress. So, yes, I could.  (Take that, Trump!) Casting a quick eye to make sure no one was around, I stripped off my soft green and blue dress and put on the slinky, tight-fitting (but fittingly tight) purple-zebra-striped dress. It fit! Haley really did give it to me, and now I, too, had changed clothes in the middle of the evening.

            Rejoining the party, giggling in anticipation of the surprise of the man I had come with (“Diana! You changed clothes!”), I looked for and found him. We chatted, we had a glass of wine, we danced – not a word. Is it possible he never even noticed?

            It was possible. Such has happened before. The first time I took a camp dress on a wilderness trip with my friend Phil, I put it on the first night after my swim, the second night, the third night – and on the third night Phil looked at me in astonishment and said, “You brought a dress?!” I said in exasperation, “Yes, and I’ve worn it for the past three nights.”

         Sometimes, though, the dress does make an impression. Years ago, at Cliff Lake in the Marble Mountain Wilderness with my friend Louann, who also brings a dress on backpacking trips, we naturally changed into our camp dresses in the evening. We were cooking our dinners when three men with fishing rods walked by our camp on the way to their own. They acknowledged our presence and passed on by. Shortly afterward, sitting by the lake to watch twilight slowly nudge daylight out of the way, we heard people on the trail again.

         “Knock-knock,” said a jovial male voice, and the three fishermen ducked through the trees into our campsite.

         “We just thought we’d come by and introduce ourselves,” the first one said and did so, calling names and grounding each name with a place.

         He, Mr. Seattle, was the outgoing, hearty one. Mr. Jacksonville, ungainly with braces on his teeth, a skinny frame, and carrot hair, slouched behind Mr. Seattle, grinning, saying little. Mr. Medford also said little but stood forthright and bold, unapologetic but unobtrusive. I understood, therefore, the following scenario:

         Mr. Seattle, Mr. Jacksonville, and Mr. Medford, returning to their campsite from their fishing spot on the lake, had passed our camp, looked up to say hello, and seen two women – my god, in dresses! – sitting on white rocks against a sparkling Cliff Lake with the 1300-foot, sunset-gold headwall of the cirque behind them. Mr. Jacksonville had the original idea: “Hey, come on! Let’s go introduce ourselves to the girls. Want to? Huh? Yeah. You can go first.”

         Mr. Seattle: “Well, sure. I’m not shy. We’ll just knock on their door – ha-ha – and go right in.” He and Mr. Jacksonville turned to Mr. Medford.

         Mr. Jacksonville: “Whattaya say? Huh? Wanna say hi to the girls? Huh?” Yuk-yuk-yuk.

         Mr. Medford: “If you go, I’ll go with you, but it’s your idea, not mine.”

         Maybe it’s the way of women, but after they left, Louann and I laughed and laughed. “It was the dresses,” I said. “I’m sure it was the dresses.” Louann agreed. Femininity is such a lure.

         Sometimes.