Italy 2026 - Day 2 - Exhausted playing mountaineer

 Bright and early I took the bus to the town of Siusi Allo Sciliar, which sits at the base of the mighty Cattinaccio D'Antermoia, a craggy rock complex that rises to an elevation of 3,001 m above sea level. My plan was to take the cable car from Siusi (1,000 m) to Compatsch (1,850 m), and from there to the platform of Bulaccia (2,174). Once I had my eyes full of mountain my plan was to walk down to Castelrotto (1,060 m). The face of Bulaccia is very steep, but there is a marked trail and I thought going downhill would be a piece of cake. Oh, boy, was I wrong.

 

The cable car ride was pretty fun, and once again I marveled at the incredible engineering involved on laying down a cable over two or three kilometers of mountainous terrain, and the machinery needed to pull it in a closed path over such long distance. At the top there were the usual amenities like restaurants and sky shops, and it took me some time to find the right track. It was hot, and as I trundled up the slope I kept wondering if the liter and a half of water I was carrying would be enough for the day. Bu noon I reached the high point, at Arnika Cabin, and from there peeked down with some anguish at the steep drop off to the valley below. Not quite a cliff, but a 60 or 70 degrees slope falling down 1,000 m into the valley.

 

A reassuring sign told me that it was 2 hours to Castelrotto, and with that I started on my way down. I noticed, with some disappointment, that the whole plateau is formed by a porphyritic pyroxene andesite and not by dolostone. Having come all this way to be in the Dolomites, I thought I would have encountered lots and lots of the eponymous rock.

 

With that kind of slope the trail was necessarily like a lumpy stair with unequal step sizes, so the hiker has to "drop" from one rock to the next, relying on good equilibrium to make the step. You do this a hundred times and your muscles start getting tired and become sluggish in the immediate response that is required from them. So you start stumbling, which is a very bad idea on that kind of slope. Immediately I had flashbacks of going down a Tepuy in Venezuela, a steep volcano in Japan, or the Pyrenees in Spain. I remember telling myself in those occasions that I was getting too old for this kind of shenanigans, swearing I would never again attempt such a foolhardy enterprise. Well, this time I paid in spades for not having learnt from my former mistakes, as I tottered down like an old man, thinking twice before taking the next step.

The human body is an astounding machine, and bipedalism has to be one of the key evolutionary moments of humankind. The incredible play between the muscles of the thigh, the keen, and the calf is such that when one muscle over extends, the remaining muscles and tendons exert just the right amount of pull to compensate. The first signal that the system is not working right is that your knees give up under you and make you stumble. I had collected two stout sticks to help me balance, and thus walking as a quadruped managed most of the tricky steps. I had to be very careful at not falling forward, for I would have tumbled tens of meters, so I overbalanced backward and on a half dozen occasions fell sitting down. No big deal, right? Well, it was a big deal, because to get up from the floor your thighs have to apply a significant amount of force and I had none left. So I had to take off my backpack to reduce the weight to be lifted, and by pulling myself up on my walking sticks managed to get vertical again and restart the ordeal.

The trail was pretty lonely, but three or four times I was overtaken by couples, some young and some old, who obviously realized my plight and were very sympathetic. On one occasion, a msn came back from a rest stop to offer to carry my backpack down to the sitting area. I didn't want to acknowledge I could use the help, but he insisted saying he had come back specifically to help me and I had to give in. This cabin, which was half way down, was supposed to be reached in one hour, and it had taken me two hours to do it. Since that was half way, it meant it would take me another two hours or more to reach Castelrotto!

Fortunately, another alternative came to mind. Looking at the map I realized that I could contour the slope to reach the funicular at Marinzen (1,486 m), and from there let technology take me down. So I did that. Contouring was a lot easier that going straight down, and under a light drizzle I was delighted to see the station of the funicular just a few hundred meters ahead.

Down in the town I still walked like I was wearing polio braces, but managed to reach the bus stop just in time to take the bus back to my town, Ortisei, where I could indulge in a heavy dose of Iboprufen and some much needed rest.