Alta Via 1 – Day 7
Hiking the Italian Dolomites
- Rifugios Tissi to Rifugio Carestiato
- Steps: 28,704
- Kilometres: 21.5
- Hours: 10
- Calories: 3,164
- Total ascent: 1627m
- Total descent: 2048m
- Max elevation: 2255m
This morning I was keen to see if I could get my Every Scarf back. I knew I must have dropped it on the pathway up the rifugio, and the first part of the today’s track goes back down the same way we came up. However, the path is a series of small intertwining paths, and there was no guarantee that I was going to retrace the same steps. So, I spoke to a few hikers who were leaving super early and I gave them a description of my scarf. I asked them to keep an eye out for it, and if they found it to please put it up somewhere high that I might see it.
We had breakfast and set out down the hill and as we approached a boulder, sure enough, there was my scarf! One of the early hikers (I’ll never know who, but if you’re reading this, thank you!) had found it and put it on the boulder for me to find. Poor Every, she was frozen solid! I teased her folds gently apart and she gradually defrosted.
After a relatively easy undulating walk we reached Rifugio Vazzoler for a very early lunch. We shed some layers and soaked up the sun for a bit. Then there was a delightful wide easy track for a while with some awesome views of the tall rocky peaks.
It was of course the undulating pathway was too good to be true and eventually we turned off into a scrubby area and started uphill again. The next couple of hours took us up through a forested area where the views gave way to a forest of tall trees.
I was slow and I could hear some doof-doof music coming closer and closer up the forest behind me. Two tall well-built Czeck lads dressed in black went marching past me, with a stereo hanging off a backpack. They said hello as they rocketed up the hill, disappearing into the distance with their muscles and music. As they passed me, I thought about offering them 100 euros to carry my pack to the rifugio. I found out later that they had actually helped a couple of hikers by carrying their packs over a difficult section. I should have opened my mouth!
I don’t know what happened with the distance today, it was supposed to be 15km but turned out quite a bit longer. On the other days, the measured distance of the hike had been close to the estimate given in the route maps.
This far into the AV1, the track gets more difficult because there are fewer people walking it. There was a lot of balancing, careful stepping, getting over large tree roots and around large boulders. We had to:
- Navigate a scree field
- Traverse a boulder field on a steep slope with a scary drop away
- Haul ourselves up a section of track that had been washed away
- Get around a boulder by hanging onto an iron rope so we didn’t fall into an abyss
- Get down on our bottoms to get down some sections that were too steep to step down
Between the track difficulty and the long distance, I was just done by the end of the day. In the last km I was stopping every couple of minutes to rest briefly. Steve got to Rifugio Carestiato nearly an hour ahead of me, had a beer and found our dorm room. This time we were sharing with the lovely 3 Belgian sisters that we met on day 4, which was a nice surprise. I felt more comfortable sharing the room with “old friends” rather than complete strangers.
Although we had a dormitory again, the shared bathrooms were whole rooms with loo, shower and sink, so you could do all your business at once in private, and there were adequate bathrooms for the number of guests. The rifugio was quite cosy.
I was so wrecked by the end of this day, I suggested to Steve we go with Plan B for day 8. We would decide in the morning.
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