Entering the Sky

A Walking Diary from the Dolomite Mountains

DAY 1

On the first day it hails. Shelterless, we huddle against a waist high rock on the exposed slopes. Frigid wind whips pellets of ice in all directions as we count the seconds between lightning and thunderclaps. Sky ice liquifies our clothes and we shiver violently. The mountains roar their welcome. We aren’t in Kansas anymore, Triton.

With the lightning adequately distant, we start walking, mostly for warmth. My hands are frozen to the palm. Gripping poles clumsily we slip up a steep shale field, shoes like swimming pools. Halfway up, the sun comes out. Our first taste of these mountains’ meteorological humour.

At the top of the pass, the view is religious. I cry from exposure to sublimity. The ecstasy of realising one’s relative minutiae. Against this expanse of dazzling infinity we are enveloped in insignificance, high enough to blur our edges with the ether.

We enter the sky.

My fingers burn as feeling comes back. We pause to tip water out of our shoes. Halfway to heaven, half a day in, and we are already born again. I laugh. Of course the mountains didn’t storm on us. The mountains simply storm. Here we are.

Half a muesli bar for courage and we squelch below an emerald ridgeline for a few hours in the sunlight.

We make it to our first rifuguo just before the next storm. All of Triton's clothes are wet, but they have pasta and cheese here.

Dalmatian bunnies come out at sunset. We check the map. Tomorrow is a bigger day.

DAY 2

Today we go to the moon. Trail marked 666. Scree fields like rocky waterfalls as we fall upwards into the cold folds of the Sella Plateau. I grip the wire line and climb limestone wet from snowmelt. Triton is happy on the rocks. He seems to float upwards - the ascension of a sweaty, smiling messiah.

I learn the art of pockets and precision packing. Crag gloves at the quick draw. Energy bars accessible without pause. Just the right amount of water to not carry a gram more. Every time grey clouds gather we keep an eye on nearby caves - now hot real estate options, but no hail today.

I start to get dizzy over 2,800m. One step a a time. Fuzzy tingles on my forehead and I try not to look down. I remember this feeling from the Annapurnas in ‘04. Nearly 20 years since I visited such heights. Realms of rock and ice where the stones hold sway.

We enter the light at the top of all things.

Finally we find the rifugio just as I start to feel faint. They say the forecast looks wild overnight. The sky laughs. The higher we get, the smaller we become.

I lay by the window to acclimatise. A fox lives here! I see her lithe form disappear swiftly underground as the grey mist rolls in and darkness blankets us all.

DAY 3

An early start to beat the severe weather warning. But all clouds seem to be below us from here. The air still thin and lucid, close to outer space. We walk fast and raspy over old snow, crystalline in the young light. Wind chill.

My head feels better this morning. We climb to 3150m near Piz Boè, our highest point, before taking a chairlift 1km directly down. Hermes on winged sandals.

These mountains like a box of chocolates. Every day a different surprise. I learn to take smaller steps. To relax. There is no way of knowing what will happen next.

Near Passo Fedai we drink ciocolatta calda and watch the Marmolata spires across the vale. 11 people unwillingly sacrificed themselves to that mountain’s slopes last year. Clouds cuddle the summit in a cashmere blanket of secrecy. Peaks appear and disappear like fans dancers in the gases. A most majestic burlesque. We leave the ominous striptease behind and sleep by the lake far below.

DAY 4

Bags packed by 5:30am. Leave before 6 senza colazione. I wake with my left eye swollen and throbbing. This morning’s descent is steep. Pine forests and waterfalls through a lush valley floor. Stations of the cross. Madonna behind bars.

At an isolated pass we crawl WW1 caves. The front line was right here. Geological remnants of elevated horrors. I am incredulous at what was endured. Me, on holidays in high-tech microfibre thermafleece. Them, in wet feet and crossfire all winter. An unbearable unfairness of wasted blood on snow.

We meet marmots, cows, bumblebees in fur coats. At the rifugio that afternoon it hails. The waiter runs outside in panic - he is checking the tiny new flowers they planted on the balcony.

DAY 5

My eye is red and inexplicably bruised this morning.

I hitch a ride down the valley. My driver, the waiter, is a famous climber for North Face, and emergency mountain rescuer in his spare time. He tells me about K2. I’m dropped in town but it’s Sunday - medical centres are all closed. Hours of phone calls, buses, waiting waiting waiting. I find a doctor and a chemist. Lucky I speak enough Italian.

Triton is out hiking alone. My bus goes past an ambulance, a man is sprawled on the roadside. I feel nervous.

Turns out Trit had a blast glissading down a scree slope without me. We rendezvous by 4 and I am craving elevation. We take a chairlift up just high enough to wash off the waiting rooms. The grandeur and silence - clarifying and refreshing. We sit until the sun drops behind the hills.

My mind empties out into the wide open.

DAY 6

Today is the closest I’ve ever come to a glacier. On the final pass we are shoulder to shoulder and almost as cold. Thunder pursues us as we keep up pace on the ascents.

Rumour at the halfway rifugio is of a bigger storm to come. But we have 4 hours to go - so we scoff our pasta and surrender to walking in the wet. Triton’s calves are mud-coated and my poles are swallowed in cow pats mixed with mush. A pine tree gives us shelter for afternoon tea, copying how the cows do it. We share an energy bar till I shiver then continue upward into the storm, mainly for warmth.

Sore itchy eyes and a soggy panting ascent. Waterproof jacket is my saviour. I worship the ski gloves Triton packed as an afterthought.

On arrival at the rif today shaggy peaks weave in and out of the mist for 360 degrees. Our last night at height. I am struck by the rapture of vastness. The landscape elevates us into the chaotic mystery of existence. We are almost invisible now. There is a joy and a terror in that exquisite disappearance. A respite from the exhausting burden of self-importance.

This must be what they mean by lightness of being.

That afternoon, Triton sleeps as thunder slaps around jagged crests outside. Hail bounces off windowsills - the familiar percussion of our evenings - as I snuggle under a doona, reading Robert MacFarlane’s crossing of glacial seas. The ground is gradually sprinkled in ice.

DAY 7

Hours of climbing cliffside in white out. A foggy dream. Traversing clouds is like walking in an unearthly apocalypse. We hunt for each cairn only 10m away. Faceless figures drift in and out of view before the mist closes over us, disappearing the world.

I feel exhausted. Hauling this leaden body skyward one last time. Both my eyes getting worse, burning today in the glare and wind.

We summit Cima Rosetta - a small (2700m) bluff. In a moment of grace the clouds part and Pale San Martino is revealed, flashing green and blue like a fantasy novel then in a beat blurring to white again, remaining forever captive to us behind the clouds.

Way down in the valley that night I fall asleep before laying down. There is a sadness - a nostalgia for the mountains already. I crane my neck to see them from our hotel at a mere 800m.

An addiction to verticality is being born in me. The ascent, the escape, or perhaps the return to a bigness and brightness that cleaves the distinction between human and earth. Between form and formless. All slowly traversing time and space, falling upwards as these mountains have for millions of years. Once a sea floor, today god’s doormat.

May each step be an homage to the kinship of snow and sweat, cloud and breath, flesh and stone. A devotion to the mutuality of our being, from Palaeocene to Anthropocene.

All of us merely drifting through the ether. All of us merely a matter of perspective.