Day 10 (Saturday)It was time to be moving on from our lovely campground. We headed east towards Cortina. On the way I had another treat in store for Sally. Another via feratta.
For this one we needed to ascend a cable car with the tourists. This time I took the ice spikes and trekking poles together with all the via via feratta kit. The woman in the ticket office seemed surprised when we asked for one-way tickets - "there is snow on the top" she said. "Not a problem" I replied.
There were loads of day-trippers at the top enjoying the views and the coffee and snacks. We stopped, put on our gear and got some looks as we separated from the crowd and started descending the steep snow slopes:
We reached the top entrance to a network of fortifications dug into the rock in WWI:
Unfortunately over the winter a lot of snow had blown into these caverns partly blocking them and we found that the passageway descended into water and was unpassable. We had to return the way we came and descend around the outside of the mountain in the snow instead of through the mountain as planned.
As we descended we saw a family rushing down the same slopes - well, the determined father rushing and the poor family being dragged behind. He was definitely on a mission. He rushed past us and we heard his wife berate him in German (obviously for being in inconsiderate idiot). We passed him shortly after when she finally forced him to stop and have a picnic. He seemed to be determined to demonstrate his ability to storm down the mountain faster than we dared go. I suspect he looked at us with all our gear on (I was still wearing my helmet too since I was trying to protect my head from sun burn), and probably thought "look at these stupid tourists with all their gear just for walking". Next time I saw him I was looking down from a via feratta. His family stopped and pointed up at us. He looked slightly deflated, I suspect because the reason for all our stupid gear was now apparent and his attempt to impress his family with his macho snow descent now didn't look quite so impressive when the middle-aged woman he smugly overtook was climbing a vertical rock face and gaining more interest from his family.
This particular ascent was a dead end, but we carried on along the track and explored some of the bottom sections of the tunnels that were blocked further up.
A group of 4 Americans in their late teens came up the path from below as we descended and started trying to climb into the tunnels without any equipment - possible, but not really advisable in sneakers in the ice. Annoyingly the last girl in the group had a radio or similar playing pop music as she walked through the countryside - not in ear phones as a runner might to keep them motivated, but blaring out so everyone on the mountain could hear. When we got to the bottom a large party of Americans were congregating back at their coach ready to leave - I suspect this was the same coach group. I wonder if the inconsiderate teenagers were also responsible for delaying that coach since it looked ready to leave when we reached the bottom.
I do like the toys you see in these mountains:
Having not filled up with diesel for 5 days we were now running on fumes. Luckily it was down hill all the way to Cortina. It was a struggle to find a gas station though. Being a reasonable size town I would have expected several. I found one. And at $2.45 per litre wasn't a great place to fill up, but we didn't have any choice. I filled the tank completely assuming I wouldn't find a cheaper price, but we found the following day that diesel in Austria was only $1.76 per litre!
We passed the old Cortina Winter Olympics ski jump. Sally pointed it out "1956 Winter Olympics" she said - how she remembers this stuff I don't know, but then she can remember telephone numbers she saw once - however, if she does something and hurts herself doing it she completely fails to remember that and will repeat the same mistake over and over again, maybe that is part of being a lion :B
We headed up towards one of the most famous views of the Dolomites, just east of Cortina. Again, up more twisty mountain roads. Towards the top is a toll road leading to a refugio and a beautiful high level walk. There is an expensive toll to get up that road though and it was now 4pm. I didn't want to pay the toll for a quick half an hour or so walking. If paying that I wanted to have a whole morning of walking at least. So we turned around and had a coffee and cake at a restaurant nestled among the mountains next to a small lake and admired the view:
We then descended a short distance to an open area where we had found a large car park which was available to camp in officially over night. It had free water and a dump station, but overnight parking required feeding coins into an expensive meter, charging $13 just to stay in the car park. Because we wanted to go back up to that refugio in the morning and hike I decided to pay it - it was a fairly nice location:
However, as the evening wore on the nice weather disappeared and we had to move inside:
Although the campground seemed over priced, plenty of RVs turned up in the evening, so it clearly wasn't just us being taken advantage of.
We slept fairly well, although the wind did get up in the night.
Stay tuned for Austria...
Steve.
