Trip report: Dolomite Mountains (and 5 other countries)

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.

Day 9 (Friday)

Remember a few days earlier we had asked about rafting? Sally had phoned the rafting company and made a reservation for us.

We arrived early and sat waiting, though it wasn't clear where we were supposed to meet the rafting people - there was a sign, but it pointed back at the car park, and the guy on the phone had just said meet at the car park.

Eventually, after seeing a couple of suitably rugged looking guys cross the bridge we followed and spotted an unmarked area below the cable car station - this was indeed the place.

I changed into the supplied wetsuit and stupidly I left my waterproof camera with my clothes. Organised activities like this these days tend to have all sorts of rules about what you can't take with you, indemnity, waivers, only allowed to purchase their photos and video, etc. It turned out that the young guys running this didn't care two hoots about that sort of stuff, all they said was - just pay us afterwards (free if you drown).



The rapids were fairly tame, but we had a great time. On board was the son of the business owner, his muscly friend (who didn't speak English), a couple of guys from Israel, a German guy who had tried this once before in Canada and us. What was really nice was not just that the guys running it were laid back, but everyone else doing it was pretty much a beginner and no-one was trying to impress anyone else or complain they weren't in their favorite position or didn't have the right equipment or the water wasn't exciting enough.



The trip included a side-detour to a water fall and a chance to sneakily climb up a bridge and jump off it into the water (I don't think more official or safety conscious rafting companies would have stood for any of that) - "yeh, sometimes we jump off the bridge over there - OK, you want to? we could do that..." - well, Sally didn't need much encouraging, and the other guys couldn't back down once she had set the challenge. I stayed in the boat and helped Mr Muscle maneuver it while Sally and the others climbed the half-broken access ladder up the bridge to jump in unison. The Israeli said "In my country, we say of someone who has no fear that 'they are a lion'. Your wife is a lion".

We exchanged email addresses with the Israeli so I could email him the team photo, then drove around to the waterfall and parked for lunch:



We returned to the campground achy but happy.

Stay tuned for more climbing and the start of our journey north...

Day 8 (Thursday)

Since yesterday failed to invalidate our travel insurance, today would have to suffice.

Sally had been talking for months about climbing some via feratta. These are climbs in the Dolomites that are protected with fixed steel wire bolted into the rock faces. Many were put in place during WWI when the Italians spent almost the entire war fighting the Austrians in these brutal mountains - predictably no-one could get ahead, but the result was a set of excellent climbs put in place to help the troops negotiate the mountains.

Sally bought a book on these and I purchased the appropriate equipment. As well as a normal climbing harness and helmet you need a special type of belay device consisting of two caribiners secured by en elasticated strap to your harness via a tear-away deceleration device - the stitching of which progressively fails to decelerate you if you fall. The steel wire doesn't give, so the via feratta equipment has to for you.

I chose an easy via feratta. Though I wasn't prepared for the fact that the hike on the approach and various unprotected bits were far more serious than the actual via feratta itself. We dediced to climb the middle peak below:



Again, there was supposed to be a chair lift running up to the start of the climb, but that was also closed until later in the month, so we had to hike up the slope, much of it loose scree. At the top was a shaded area with a 45 degree snow slope we had to traverse before reaching the start of the protected climb. Annoyingly, to keep our kit light I had left the ice spikes and the trekking poles in the truck. Our footwear, fine for the rock faces, was useless in the sloping snow, and I found the only safe way we could traverse was to attempt to dig foot holds and, having chosen a suitably sharp stone-age style rock hand axe, use that to gain a handhold in the snow.

Once past the snow we clipped into the steel wire:



It took a short while to get into the rhythm of clipping and unclipping, and guiding the caribiners along the wire past rocky outcrops, but we soon had the knack. There were a couple of sections that were thus protected, then other bits in between that were not, but were safer. I hadn't studied the climb in any detail before hand so didn't know what to expect, so was elated as the view opened up around us as we ascended the final tens of feet up to the extreme peak of the mountain:



We had the traditional cup of tea from Sally's flask before starting the descent - I could see clouds gathering and this was not a location I wanted to be in when the heavens opened.

Soon we were struggling across the snow and down the scree slopes, trying to prevent Sally from twisting her ankle again. I was slightly less concerned now since we had done the big thing that Sally really wanted to do and would have been very disappointed if injury had prevented. So we returned to the camper, backed it into a location with a nice view and as rain drops began to fall I enjoyed some Italian bread with olive oil and balsamic vinegar (Sally didn't since she couldn't touch it due to her wheat allergy).

I decided to take a different route back around the mountain. The other side was a more major pass and with a big cable car running up to a high restaurant was very popular with coach parties.

We rode up the cable car and had a hot chocolate at the top:



Then went for a walk on the snow - again I hadn't bothered taking the ice spikes - doh! I waved at Sally NOT to take the straight line route towards me from here - air isn't a great structural support:



Up on the top among the tourists a few people stood out. Sally got talking to another couple with climbing gear who were about to go off climbing. I spotted a couple of Chinese guys having a great time - they had serious mountaineering gear on (crampons, ice axes, etc.) and were having a real laugh trying this out and taking photos and video of each other. I suspected they were going to be joining some mountaineering team and were trying out the brand new equipment somewhere easy first. They chatted to passers by and fluently switched between English and Italian.

A thunder storm rolled in and we retreated back to the restaurant and took the next cable car down.

Stay tuned for wetter action...

Steve.

Back in the hotel after a day's work and a disappointing pizza, plus it is raining down here in the southern hemisphere :(, so might as well make some more headway on the trip report from last month...

Day 7 (Wednesday)

OK, so that was a day off from driving and I am getting withdrawal symptoms.

We have a relaxed morning watching a helicopter ferry building supplies to the side of the mountain, then head out. We never take the camper off when travelling - not worth the effort for us, plus with the manual jacks we have it isn't very stable when off the truck.

Sally likes the fact that passers by and owners of less interesting vehicles often stop to admire the truck camper as it passes:



We are heading off north of our current location. Not far, but it still takes over an hour to get there and involves a circuitous route across two mountain passes and around at least one mountain:



Our destination today? I'll give you a clue:



Sally will do anything that invalidates your travel insurance and having seen this activity in the alps years ago it was on the list. She had located a guy called Rubin and arranged a date for both of us to have a couple of afternoon flights soaring on the thermals. We were early and Rubin was a bit late, having a couple of other flights to do before hand (hence the above picture), so we parked in the sun at the drop zone and had lunch. The cab of the truck was getting hot in the sun until I remembered that in the truck was another thing collected from my travels - as you can probably make out from the writing this was a free sun-shield given out as a promotion from an Abu Dhabi medical centre - I went down to the supermarket looking for something, didn't find anything I wanted, but came back with this. and it works very well:



Seven of us climb into the five seats of a Citroen mini-van (it was a 7-seater, but the rear was taking up with canopies), Sally sharing the front passenger bucket seat with Rubin's wife. On arrival at the top the model glider pilots are setting up:



However, the wind has turned. Many worried looks and a lot of waiting ensue:



A small storm passes overhead and we all retreat inside the cafe at the top; Rubin buys us a coffee. Another hour passes with Rubin repeatedly inspecting the satellite imagery of the area via his smart phone. Eventually a distant thunder storm crosses the far mountain range into the valley behind us. This is the end (my only friend the end... sorry, distracted by a Jim Morrison moment there) of our hopes of flying.

So now 8 of us pile back into the Citroen for a hair-raising descent - Rubin isn't what you would call a cautious driver on these mountain roads.

Despite the disappointment Rubin and his wife have been lovely company and for us that is a big chunk of money saved to spend on other activities, so we return to the campground to savor our disappointment.

Stay tuned for some climbing...

Thanks for the comments guys. I'll get back to everyone at the end of the report, I promise.

Day 6 (Tuesday)

We had a good night's sleep and it was lovely to be able to lie in bed late in the morning not having to drive anywhere. We both agreed we wouldn't move the camper today. Instead, with the aid of the maps I bought we located a high-level walk we could do with the aid of a cable car from the local village in the valley below.

We walked from the campground down into the valley, this being a ski resort in winter there are multiple cable cars heading up the various valley walls. We planned to take one that heads up the mountain above the ski resort and terminates close to a chair lift that then takes you to a point where you can hike along a ridge line in the direction of the high peak of Marmolada, possibly the highest one in the Dolomites. However we learned that the chair lift wouldn't be opening until next week as it was currently the gap between the ski season and the summer season, evident from the huge amounts of maintenance being done everywhere during that small window when the resorts are quiet.

We took the cable car up (those small gondalas in fact). Then proceeded to trek up the dirt road leading to the top chair chair lift station. That was a tiring climb, but the views were worth it:



Sally's ankle was holding up, but painful, so she kept having to rest. The doctor said she should have a stick to help support her when walking, so that was next on the shopping list - should have bought one before we came out really.

At the top cable car station we needed a cool off:



We reached the summit of this particular peak, climbing along the ridge and sat down for a rest and a cup of tea from Sally's flask she takes everywhere - plus a bit of mountain-top yoga - for Sally that is, I don't think my body bends quite well enough for "downward facing dog" yet, more "sideways reclining hippo":



Looking towards Marmolada Sally asked if we should hike any further along the ridge. If the upper cable car had been running then yes, but given I was pretty tired already and we would have to descend considerably to continue along the ridge line, a descent we would have to repeat in reverse on return, and Sally's ankle was playing up, I decided we would turn around at this point - no point injuring ourselves (or specifically Sally) so early in the holiday:



Close up you could see the pink rock:



And the alpine flowers were lovely:





We descended the way we came, and then walked into the main part of the village for a coffee and ice cream, followed by some shopping. Our timing wasn't great since they have a siesta and we had to wait until 3:30 for most of the shops to open. We picked up some local food and a bottle of something strange for a friend's birthday party (I'll cover that later in the report). We also found a souvenir shop that had some cheap trekking poles for sale, so we bought a pair. Sally didn't want both, so I took one and she took one - seemed to really help on the walk back up hill (in the rain) to the campground, especially since my back pack now weighed a ton, partly my fault for buying 2 litres of Italian beer alongside the other groceries.

The heavy rain that swept in confirmed that we chose the right time to descend the mountain. Throughout our stay in the region we would find the weather would deteriorate after lunch, so it was important to get off the mountains early - you wouldn't want to be stuck up a mountain when a lightning storm starts.

Stay tuned for other mountain activities to come...

Steve.

Thanks Steve... you have set a new standard for trip reports that all of us should try to achieve. The video is a very nice touch... but your pictures with your written words are fantastic... and I have the time to absorb the details... both spoken through your written words and photographs.

We have a day away from the doctors tomorrow... Janet will have a chance to enjoy your trip... she will be Wow'ed and terrified from all of the narrow, high roads.

I sent the link for your video to our grandson and his wife in England... it will give them an idea what they might do sometime over the next few years. It won't be in the near future though... she is about to bless us with our third great grandchild during July.

Looking forward to more of your trip

Sleepy Chet (it's after midnight)

Hello Steve, There are a few trip reports I consider to be at a professional level. This one, and all of yours, are at that level. I just wish more people could see and appreciate them.

I wish there were a way to go where you went on this trip without being on those roads! Narrow, steep, crowded, so scary. I can cross the Sierra Nevada on any of the passes without problems, but don't think that my acrophobia would let me complete that road down from the Stelvio Pass. Your photos and narrative make it all real. Thank you for sharing!

Day 5 (Monday)

I get some more Euros out at the local bank in the village near the campground. There is white marble everywhere, a by-product of their local quarrying.

We have a relaxed breakfast and hit the road, heading east again, this time further into Italy towards the Dolomite mountains. For the moment we have the luxury of level highway, and it is a nice relief to be in the valleys not climbing or descending mountain passes - this won't last long.

We navigate some short sections of Italian toll road - Autostrade, before climbing back onto another twisty mountain road heading up into the Dolomites. Part way along we decide we need to buy some maps, so we stop near a cable-car station. There is a town, Cavalese, on the hill opposite. I know it will be narrow streets and difficult parking so I search the GPS for parking in that town and set it to navigate there. On the way out of the cable car station car park we see a sign for white water rafting, that gets Sally all excited.

We climb up to Cavalese - the first car park doesn't look camper compatible, but carrying on through the main piazza we find more parking by the town sports complex. The parking seems to have a forest of different signs all indicating different parking durations allowed, and it is not clear which applies to which parking space. Stuffed between the dashboard and the windshield I keep a fading plastic parking disk purchased in France years ago - you set the time to indicate what time you arrived. I assume the Italian parking attendants (if any are working today) will accept the French parking disk. We walk in the direction of the town centre and find the tourist office. They are very friendly and speak excellent English. They don't know where the nearest white water rafting is though and have to look up a phone number. I.e. they don't know that if you take the cable car just below their office it leads to a rafting centre, or that (as I discovered later) that rafting centre's office is next door to the information centre.

We carry on and find a map shop. I spend ages trying to find maps of the ares in the Dolomites we want to walk in. Sally gets frustrated, but I know we will be more frustrated later if I have the wrong maps. Sally wanted to stay for an ice cream, but I was worried about the parking - I had wasted more time than I expected looking at maps and was conscious some of the parking signs said 30 minutes only. It is a pity, because it looks like a nice place to spend some time:



We hit the road again heading further east and soon see the distinctive bare shapes of the Dolomite mountains rising up above the forests.

I have put waypoints in the GPS for the major places we want to go hiking / climbing and 3 campgrounds that look like the type we will enjoy. We stop to have a look at the first one, up a forested valley. It is cheap, but Sally isn't overly impressed. She says it will be fine if there is nothing better, but insists we should try the next one on the GPS.

The next one is more central to our destinations and is on the door step of the actual Dolomites just above the village of Pozza di Fassa. Many of the buildings have lovely murals painted on them - we notice this throughout the region in the coming days, including in Austria and Germany:



The campground is very high quality, with an Italian restaurant and a health spa and pool on site:



We walk the site and pick a spot - we will use this as a base for the next 5 nights:



I can now relax knowing we have made it to our destination unscathed. Even if we have problems with the truck now, we have the time to arrange for local repair and can take a taxi or bus to visit the things we want to see.

Stay tuned for more of the Dolomites tomorrow...

Steve.

Back from a day in the office (or rather someone else's office), full up after a very nice curry, so time to get on with the story.

Day 4 (Sunday)

More eastward travel today, heading into Italy - country number 6.

First we head for the fashionable spa town of Bad Ragaz in eastern Switzerland. There is a gorge I want to walk down that is accessible fro the town (I'm less interested in the town itself - more of a country person). When researching the trip I had found the location, but struggled to see where I could park. Just outside the town, on the highway, are the Hiedi-land services, so I thought we could park there easily and walk into town. However, after pulling up at these crowded services I noticed they were surrounded by a high fence, so accessible from the highway only. Probably to prevent crime, and possibly also people using it as a free car park as we intended. So we carried on into the town itself. There were various places marked with the blue P sign, but they all appeared pretty empty and on closer inspection were marked as private. I didn't want the inconvenience of parking somewhere and finding my vehicle wheel-clamped on return because I failed to understand the small print of some notice written in German. We drove onto the town centre, but the parking there was conveniently underground - not very camper friendly. In the end we turned out of town and headed up the narrow road that wound up the edge of the mountain and then parallel with the gorge. At the top we find parking near the fire department in a small village and there is clearly a trail leading to the edge of the gorge.

We follow the trail and it starts to descend steeply the entire depth of the gorge. I worry that this was a poor decision. Sally twisted her ankle badly a couple of months ago and is still having problems with it. I am fearful she might slip on the descent, re-twist the ankle and that will ruin all the activities we have planned for the vacation.



We get down safely. At the bottom there is a nice wide flat dirt road leading along the gorge. People are strolling happily along with baby strollers, oblivious to the descent and climb from the top. We walk a short way along the gorge, but need to turn back - we have burned up enough time already and need to get on our way to Italy.

Actually the trip back up wasn't too bad - these days I prefer climbing than descending - the former is much kinder on knees and ankles and much lower risk.

A lot of Switzerland's road system seems to be underground - lots of mountains to tunnel through. I can see why they need to charge to use it:



We headed further south east for Davos. Before Davos all sensible traffic either stays on the divided highway for an easy crossing into Italy, or takes the train from Klosters that goes through the mountain (much like the channel tunnel we took a few days earlier). Not for us that, we have a truck camper. We stop at Davos for a snack by the lake (we don't bother going into Davos itself, again, we need to get miles under our wheels today). The car park was tight, but putting the truck in low ratio 4x2 makes these maneuvers much easier - I can leave the truck to inch along at idle avoiding revving the engine and slipping the clutch - not quite as easy as an auto transmission, but bridges the gap.



From Davos we turn east again up a steep minor road that is in the process of being reconstructed over the Fieula pass. Eventually we reach a small village where the road is only just wide enough for our camper to squeeze between the buildings. Not helped by a motorbike and camper coming in the other direction. We squeeze past and turn right up another narrow road. I've changed down into low ratio so I don't burn out the clutch on these steep hill-starts. We carry on up the hill in low ratio. This is a very minor road up Umbrail pass - it barely shows on Google maps. It is very steep and has extreme switch backs, in places not much wider than the camper and often with no protection if you stray too close to the drop on the edge. Having a right-hand drive vehicle is a benefit here because I can see where the edge of the road is and get my wheels right up to it. The switchbacks also need careful judgement to get around them in one go because they are tighter than the turning circle of my truck (which in turn is tighter than a full-size truck's turning circle).

Can't help thinking of the Italian Job while driving these roads.

Motorbikes are becoming more prevalent as we get closer to one of Europe's favorite biker roads. Insanely there are almost as many cyclists. This is extremely tiring to drive, let alone cycle up. Plus many sections of this are dirt road where it is under maintenance.

At the top is a frozen lake and a cafe full of bikers (the cafe, not the lake - well, I assume not):



On the road we pass a sad casualty of the extreme climbs. for 2 weeks we will be driving continuous mountain passes with grades of up to 24%, maybe steeper, and we are fully laden, carrying probably 2500 lbs. Our truck is pretty tough, but even I start to detect an increasing vibration around 10mph indicating a drive shaft UJ is probably on its way out (the conditions in the Sahara the other year probably sealed its fate). It will last until we get home. Unfortunately for this family that wasn't the case - the father hugs the crying daughter as the family expedition vehicle is winched onto a recovery truck. I've owned Land Rovers before and as much as I love them I don't trust their drive-trains - one more worry I don't want to have when travelling long distance in foreign countries:



Just before entering into Italy:



We now start the climb to the top of the famous Stelvio Pass:



Again, the top is rammed with bikers. They are everywhere on every type of motorbike. We pull in just after the restaurant at the top. We can't park, but managed to stop to take a quick photo - this is what awaits us going down:



You can only see a fraction of the switchbacks in this picture.

Again, more cyclists battling up. Actually battling is the wrong word. We are at altitude and they have just cycled non-stop up thousands of feet of extremely steep road, and the buggers aren't even out of breath! That is just wrong - I get out of breath cycling to the shops, and that is on the flat.



I have drum brakes on the rear. Even if I had powerful all-around disks I wouldn't want to burn through my brakes riding them all the way down this lot. So I went down in low ratio 2nd, changing to 1st on the switchbacks, blowing the air horns on entry to warn opposing traffic that I would be swinging wide and taking the whole road.

I kept checking for bikes and sports cars in the mirrors and when I saw them would indicate and slow right down on the short straight bits so they could power past - everyone else on the road had come to challenge themselves against its turns at high speed, not to follow an old truck camper as it crawled down.

There was some mad passing though. Typically where a group of 3 or 4 riders were together. The first rider would pass safely, the second would cut it fine with the approaching traffic, and the third, in a suicidal bid to follow his friends would accelerate, swerve out and just miss the oncoming vehicle as he swerved back in again. One slight mistake would have meant instant death, probably crushed under my truck.

We stopped at a restaurant to buy a sticker and some more post cards, and use their toilet. We could smell the burning brakes of those drivers who didn't understand brake fade, and watched as someone in a class B attempted to climb one of the switchbacks, all slipping clutch and revving engine.

Down in the valley we could finally change up into high ratio - the diesel engine on my truck owes more to sports car engine design than classic truck diesel and fantastic as it is to drive its engine braking is useless, hence low ratio going down hill.

Down in the fertile Italian valley at last we can see the vinyards and marble quarries. Driving along we spot a sign for a campground and go to investigate. Expensive, but one of the best we've stayed at:



A beer or two was definitely needed after that day's drive.

Stay tuned as we next head into the Dolomites...

Steve.