Il Dolomiti

The despair Slovenia's police force bestowed on us slowly began to wear off. We drove for a while after dark, aiming to drive to our next destination via the Great Dolomites Road which links Lienz, Austria and the small town of Moena, Italy. We camped somewhere on the Italian side of the border, well above the snow line, having no idea of our surroundings.

I woke up soon after dawn to find a perfectly clear day and the faces of considerable sized peaks imposing themselves over the landscape on two sides of the road. I found a sign a short distance away, notifying me that the closest peak was Cristallo which is over 3000m. I was keen to get up a peak so once we were packed we got in the car and drove up the now barren ski fields to cook breakfast, gaining maybe 200m elevation in what seemed to be a very short time. There was a fair bit of wheel spin on the ascent which was halted prematurely by the option of crossing an extremely sketchy looking bridge or taking the way around it. We attempted the way around it but the car simply couldnt make it up, it was steeper than anything we had encountered so far and involved two difficult corners.

Closed in the interim between ski season and summer

We stopped here and made breakfast before continuing on foot. The sheer scale of the mountains was daunting, particularly the insignificance of climbing 100m of vertical. We veered off the road and experimented with a “short cut” that turned out to be a nightmarish slide of loose rock. A few ordeals and about an hour an half later and we were back on solid ground, still gravel but held together loosely by small alpine plants. Rounding a knolled ridge we were relieved to see stairs up the steep gully beneath us. This section looked far more dangerous than anything we'd crossed so far.

The stair case was pretty precarious in itself. It was hard to see how it was attached to the landscape as the rock was so loose and it even had cables to clip yourself in using a via ferrata kit. At the top of this we found ski lifts and a rifugio/ restaurant at 2200m. The snow was extensive, the icy remnants of winter dumps still covering all the slopes in sight. We pushed on uphill, trying to see just how far up we could get. We found some ski poles lower down which were useful for cutting steps in the steep parts. After 100m of elevation gain or so we decided it would be futile to try and push higher so we headed to the rock-line and scrambled up a sometimes very loose ridge to reach a pinnacle and get a bit of a view.

We could see a snow-plow with huge tread carving out the road below in an attempt to clear it of ice for summer and a group of birds continually dove, soared and played in the air around us. It would have had a real wilderness feel if it wasn't for the intrusive ski lift making its way steeply up the ampitheatre like valley below us.

After taking a few pictures we begun descending carefully, doing our best not to dislodge any rocks that would cause us serious problems. We got back to the car via a completely different way, much faster than we came up.

The scenery on the road only improved from here, the tree line breaking to reveal towns fringed by graving pastures, overshadowed in every direction by the sheer size of the Dolomites. We crossed two 2200m passes, stopping for some bouldering in the snow at one of them. At the second one I think we found a bouldering area I had read about online but the day was getting on and they were surrounded by deep snow so we didn't stop to investigate.

The volume of switchbacks in this area is simply huge, inevitable when building roads through such steep country. This route was much longer because of this but well worth it and after a 6am start we still arrived in the northern Italian city of Merano well before dark with time to walk around and find our bearings.