Mountains > Articles > The Dolomites

For someone who has always been a fan of high alpine meadows - their lushness, their gemutlichkeit, and of course childhood memories of Julie Andrews turning circle in a dirndl - it seemed a cruel irony to be dragged from sleep by a cowbell. It ranged in from half a mile, clunking and ringing me out of consciousness, drifting insistently closer and closer. Apparently the juiciest grass of all was directly beneath our bedroom window. I was irretrievably awake by the time it moved on.

I wasn’t actually expecting meadows in the Dolomites. They are a ruckus of limestone, pushed up from an ancient seabed, that fringes the southern Alps. As sedimentary rock there’s not a triangular point among them. Instead they rise in crowns, straight sided and ragged topped, like ranges of teeth. The green high meadows are their gums.

They are magnificent for walking. We hiked from town to town, grabbing a picnic of raisin-loaded bread, strange sausages and peaches, and used the ski lifts and cable cars (they remain open year round) to avoid a steep climb first thing in the morning. On the heights, the ground was relatively flat. At the end of the day we made our way down in time to find a hotel before dark. Late August was past the height of the season, so there was no trouble in finding a room in the resort towns that line the valleys.

Our first day took us up from Val Gardena into the Puez Group. For a while the greenness was there, but as we climbed it evaporated and we were swallowed into the stained grey and white landscape of the bare mountains, whose peaks soared around us. It’s a hard and thirsty landscape this. Any surface water evaporates or trickles down through the porous limestone. Only a few plants survive, in nooks and crannies.

The split and crack of waterborne decay was clear to see, in micro as well as on the grand scale. Underfoot irregular, pebbles lay like aggregate and chips of stone protruded from the compacted ground, as desiccated and brittle as human bone. Above us scree slopes hung like frozen waterfalls, vast boulders strewn among them where they had tumbled. Higher still, in the vertical face of the rock, acre-sized slabs were poised at agonising angles, waiting hundreds, thousands of years, for the moment that unfreezing ice will break and topple them. It would be a miserably unlucky chance of course, to be under one of these lumps when it decide to break off, but it is still somehow frightening walking under them.

In the indefinite moonscape of white and grey, the paths were easy to follow, marked with reassuringly regular red flashes. There were plenty of refuges open, so we found ourselves taking leisurely pauses to admire the scenery. My conclusion was that, grey and so visibly in decay, the Dolomites are not actually that attractive. But they are certainly magnificent.

In place of a sleeping bag and a cooking stove we had packed clean clothes, so that we could go out to dinner. It worked rather well. At the end of the first day we descended into the village of Pederaces in Val Badia, checked into a pension, and headed out for a bowl of pasta.

Our three days of walking in the Dolomites were surprisingly and satisfyingly different. Next day, the morning of the cowbell, we spent entirely beneath the tree line in pine forests and in the meadows. We set off walking, rejecting the chair-lift on this occasion, and headed uphill to a small chapel, San Croce, the Holy Cross. Pilgrims have come this way for centuries and the route was marked at regular intervals by the stations of the cross. It was steep, so they made quite convenient stopping points for a breather.

Strangely, when we had reached number eight or nine, where Jesus falls for the third time, we found another Calvary starting anew. Apparently this concertina-ed version had been put in place especially for those who had decided on the chair-lift after all. Oh well.

The chapel itself seemed tiny beneath the raging face of the Fanes range, but it was a handsome size by the time we reached it. Inside it gloried in white and gold and hefty alpine self-assurance. The statue of the Holy Cross was in place. It is brought up here each year in May and then taken down for the winter in October. We took our first cup of chocolate of the day in the wind-shadow of the refuge (originally built in 1718 as a hostel for the pilgrims).

Leaving the chapel, the path meandered downhill through the trees and meadows to the village of San Cassiano. Pairs of Germans passed, dressed in green, greeting us with a Gruss Gott, and small groups of French. The Italians came in gaggles, brightly coloured and audible from miles off, all screeches and screams. It’s a wonder they don’t set off avalanches.

Then, as we skirted a meadow with its typical hay barn and small separate kitchen, we heard a man’s voice through the trees, singing opera. He came past, smiling as he went. It was Italian opera of course. Somehow, though, it didn’t quite fit. This area still feels more German than Italian to me. As it happens, it was German-speaking for a long time - the Region of Alto Adige was formerly the Austrian Sudtirol. Dinner is just as much Wiener schnitzel as pasta.

But there is also a third group, which has been here longer than either the Germans or Italians. The Ladin people have lived out a poor and marginalized existence here since the collapse of the Roman Empire. Until the skiers arrived of course, who put them on the map and made them prosperous in a generation.

Their old farm buildings, with tools and piles of wood stacked in the dry beneath the overhanging roofs, are just visible in the swamp of modern villas. There’s not much call for traditional farming any more, but some of the old traditions do just about survive. As we struggled up into the meadows once more we came on an old man raking grass which he had just mown. He takes it down to his cows by pick-up.

On our last day we walked the Sella range, one of the largest and most magnificent in the Dolomites. For miles we skirted beneath a vast vertical escarpment, where buttresses of rock leaned out over us dizzyingly, pushing against into the racing clouds, threatening to overbalance and fall down. On the top it was moonscape of scree, buckled limestone strata and vast tumbled blocks.

As we descended, that awful, once a thousand-year moment began to happen. A dribble of slipping rock and stone echoed around the valley, from somewhere above, increasing to a pattering flow. I looked around for a splurge of Italian colour. It was impossible to tell where the noise was coming from, or how big it might grow, but it was loud enough to get the heartbeat working overtime. But the gradually it receded and mountain silence returned. And then I saw it, a tiny puff of dust in the far distance.

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