Well, you asked for it. I warned you the whining-to-picture ratio would be very high — infinite in fact, since there will be almost nothing but whining and no photos at all. If you think an hour is a short approach, if you don’t believe whining can ever be entertaining, no matter how well done, if you’d rather not know anything about “woman troubles,” then I advise you to move on. Otherwise, well, you asked for it.
I knew the trip was doomed when the captain announced that the plane would be returning to the gate for an unknown period of time due to mechanical troubles as I simultaneously realized that I had a urinary tract infection. At this point every woman who has ever had a urinary tract infection is shaking her head and saying, “oh, you poor thing.” I know this because every woman I’ve told this story to so far has shaken her head and said, “oh, you poor thing” at exactly this moment.
For the guys who don’t know the joys of a urinary tract infection, let me describe the salient symptoms. It’s not the pain. Pain is only pain. It’s the feeling that you need to pee. Constantly. Like you pee and before you’ve got your pants fastened all the way up, you need to pee again. Oh, and then there are the sudden, uncontrollable urges. Yes, that’s a fancy way of saying incontinence.
I had the window seat because it’s easier to sleep, but after I’d made the man next to me stand up twice in the first hour of flight I asked him if he’d prefer to change seats. He said he was fine unless I was expecting to be up and down all night and I said that, sadly, I *was* expecting to be up and down all night and so we switched. Then somewhere between the second and third glass of wine (Continental, the airline of alcoholics) I had an inspiration: it would help if I put a tampon in.
I don’t know why I thought that. I don’t know if it was true. But I happened to have a tampon with me. Why? Because I was spotting. At this point you’re thinking, “Oh my God, can it get any worse?” and I’m happy to report that no, except for walking uphill for two straight hours, it never gets any worse. You won’t have to hear about any more of my bodily functions.
So I put the tampon in, not in the normal position but way down low where it was a little irritating, and it did seem to help. Or it was the Nyquil or the melatonin or the three glasses of wine, but I actually slept straight through till they raised the lights to serve us breakfast. Then I peed twice before the plane landed, once immediately upon landing, and once more after getting the rental car before we left the airport. Yeah, climbing, camping, and hiking with a urinary tract infection. It was going to be a great trip.
If you’ve ever driven to Cathedral Ledges in New Hampshire, you probably know this stretch of road I call the Cowabunga Highway. (I call it that because I can never remember it’s real name.) On the map it looks like maybe one tenth of your total drive. In real life it’s something closer to half. Route 48 through the Dolomites makes the Cowabunga Highway look short, flat, and straight. For the first section of the trip, cruising down major highways, I was nearly falling asleep. Then we left the highway and suddenly sleepiness wasn’t a problem anymore.
Tornante. I’ll see Tornante signs in my nightmares for the rest of my life. It was the first Italian word I learned and the last one I’ll ever forget. It means turn, and when they say turn in Italian, they mean turn. Imagine a turn so sharp on a road so steep that you have to take it in first gear. Now imagine there’s a bus on the other side of the road, that it’s dark, and that the road is wet. Tornante.
At the top of the pass we were expecting a refugio. It would be delightfully rustic and inexpensive. It would be full of like-minded climbers with a wizened old hut keeper dispensing weather tips, hot toddies, and advice on route selection. We’d be given a bed, a fire, and a wholesome meal. What we found was a hotel. At 50 Euros a night. Each.
We had no clue and no plan. The guidebook told us which refugio or gondola to start from. What it didn’t tell us was which refugios were open, how much they cost, where to find the start of the supposed gondola, if it was open, and how much does a gondola cost anyway because everything in Italy was turning out to be more expensive than we’d counted on. We didn’t know where to find a cheap hotel, a hostel, or a campground. At Borders there are a dozen guidebooks to Italy – each with a section for the Dolomites about five pages thick – but we didn’t even have one of those. We had a road map and a climbing topo. In between the two, we were lost.
We’d passed some tents pitched on the side of the road, so we decided to join them. We didn’t know if it was legal or not and neither did they, but we found a good spot that had been used before where the tent wasn’t visible from the road and the car was only if you looked for it, so we set up camp and went for dinner. That’s when we found out that dinner was served at 7:00. In every restaurant, every night. Come down from a ten hour day at 6:00? Oh, too bad. Should have planned better.
So I managed to mostly keep my eyes open for another hour and then we had some Italian food and called it a night. I slept the sleep of a person who’s only had five hours of sleep in the last 24. For about 4 hours. Then the urinary tract infection overcame my exhaustion and I spent the rest of the night trying to resist the urge to get up and pee and then, failing, getting up and peeing.
In the morning there was frost on the car. It was overcast and wet, having rained during the night. We took the empty Camelback up to the hotel which also had a cafe area and headed for the stairs to the bathrooms. Headed for, but didn’t reach. An angry barristo confronted us. If we were going to use the bathrooms, we had to buy something. I said I’d love a cup of coffee but could we use the bathroom first? The answer to that was no. So we bought small cups of what I’m sure was very nice though excessively priced coffee and drank them obediently but quickly to earn our right to the toilets.
Then we marched up the hill, not a long approach at all as it would turn out but my first introduction to the hellish scree slopes that are the standard way to mount in the Dolomites, and started climbing. We hoped to do a traverse of the three Sella towers but only made it through the first two towers (First Sella Tower, North-West Arete, IV+, 4 pitches and Second Sella Tower, South-West Face, III+, 3 pitches).
The climbing was quick and easy. We were behind another team on the first tower, which slowed us down but reassured me. They’d been rained off this same route the day before and knew how the first couple of pitches went. Plus, this was their second trip to the Dolomites. Following along behind them I didn’t have to worry about route finding. As it turns out, route finding at the Dolomites boils down to anchor finding. When I arrived at the first belay I asked the previous leader how he’d happened to find this supposed anchor (a single, cemented-in pin with a gigantic ring, like you’d hang from your door knocker is the standard Dolomite anchor). By the end of the trip I could spot a single cemented-in pin, with or without the telltale belay ring, from 20 meters. In between pins the route finding is academic. Almost everything in the Dolomites is 5.easy.
Not only was this our introduction to route finding and the thrill of a one point anchor, but we also got our first understanding of what the word “polished” means. You know how marble is kind of slick? Now polish it. The crux of this tower, something like 5.4 according to the conversion chart, felt hard enough for the grade thanks to polish. I guess even the world’s biggest jug loses something when it’s made of glass.
Our forerunners were rapping down but we forged on, unerringly finding our way down the backside of the first tower to the intersection with the start of our route on the second tower. We made faster time on the second tower because there was no one ahead of us but lost a little time trying to find the start of the third tower. When we finally located the rappel between the second and third towers and looked at what we’d later be descending, we lost our nerve.
A thick fog/cloud had come in. It was freezing cold and we were underdressed. At times it sprinkled, or snowed possibly. We needed to do two rappels down, then scramble up a gully, walk along a crumbling ledge, climb eight pitches, then rappel a bit, scramble back down the crumbling ledge, downclimb the gully, rappel some more, and then hike out. On later days we wouldn’t have thought twice – heck, the option of rappelling past some of the difficulties would have sounded like heaven – but we didn’t have our solo heads on yet. It sounded like a long, complicated descent.
So we skipped the third tower and started down from the second. Slide down a bit of scree slope, downclimb some 5.0 rock, repeat. I think we downclimbed farther than we had climbed up. When we made it back to the car, we congratulated ourselves on a successful day. We’d found the start of the route, climbed the pitches very quickly, found our way back down, and downclimbed what we’d needed to downclimb (the guidebook warns that if you’re not willing to downclimb 5.2 rock, you’d best not start up in the first place).
We camped in the same spot, woke up to the same ice on the windshield, and found another short approach up yet another scree slope. Even on these short approaches it was clear that there was a wide gap between what Marc was capable of and what I was capable of. Although we were doing the approaches in about the time the guidebook said we should (which I consider an accomplishment in itself), it was obvious that we’d be doing them in half that time if only half our team were doing them.
Our goal was the South Face of Piz Ciavazes (IV+, 8 pitches) but when we got there we found the first pitch dripping with water. Marc scouted out an alternative first pitch and I led it nervously until I found some pins along the way. I guess we weren’t the first people to try to avoid the waterfall that was the regular start. Since my alternate start had two pins on it, only one of which was complete crap, it was better protected than most pitches, so I had no complaints.
We ran up the route in no time and ran back down again in considerably more time. Then we traversed over to the First Sella Tower and did the South-West Corner (V-, 5 pitches). The crux pitch was the hardest we’d climbed so far (about 5.6) and sustained. We were pleased to find quite a few protection pins in place. This was the first sign of “adequate fixed protection” we’d seen. It made us think we could probably push a little harder difficulty-wise. Plus, we clearly had the speed thing down.
So we were Dolomite champions with the system wired. I was even doing OK with the urinary tract infection. Aside from getting up a million times in the night, I had a handle on it. I just needed to keep that tampon in, seated low. I was starting to wish I’d brought more tampons. I hadn’t planned on wearing one 24 hours a day for the whole trip and my supply was dwindling fast.
It was time to move. Goodbye to our gypsy camping site and the short approaches. On to Cortina.
We had a route picked out. The guidebook indicated we should start from a refugio. That seemed like a good thing. I had dreams of a shower and waking up to a warm room. We knew the refugio was at the end of a toll road but we didn’t know what “toll road” meant. We’d paid tolls on the highway, perfectly reasonable tolls. Like it cost 15 Euros to go all the way from Milan to the Dolomites, hours and hours of driving. But the toll road to the refugio cost 20 Euros. Just to get on it. And at the end was what? Who knew how much the refugio itself would cost or if it was even open or if there’d be a stack of fifty climbers there planning to do the same route.
We turned around. I was too tired and grumpy – too many tornante and too tempted by the idea of indoor plumbing – to go exploring for another spot to throw down our tent. We stopped at the first hotel we came to and were lucky to find it available and inexpensive. We flipped through the guidebook and picked out something that didn’t start from a toll road: the South-East Arete of Punta Fiames (V, 15 pitches). It had a two hour approach, 15 pitches of climbing including several harder than any we’d yet climbed, and a 1 1/2 hour descent, but we figured we could pull it off. I didn’t really care. Cuddled up three steps away from a flushing toilet, I slept well for the first time since reaching Italy.
But the next morning we couldn’t find the start of our route. The two guidebooks described different approaches and we couldn’t find either one. My book said to start from the hospital two kilometers outside of town. There was no hospital two kilometers outside of town. There was a hospital in town but it had a different name than the one given in the guidebook. Could this be it? We drove slowly around the hospital grounds looking for a path that led towards the mountains. I was looking for something else too. I was looking for a sign. Here I was, outside a hospital. Could I walk in there? Would they have a clinic? An emergency room? Would they help me, could they understand me? Should I raise the issue with Marc?
It seems odd probably – that I can talk about my plumbing troubles to any passing stranger on the internet and I wouldn’t bring it up to my climbing partner – but the fact was that I saw no point. Unless I had a solution to propose it seemed like telling him would only involve him in my discomfort. What could he do? I should have said something in Milan. We could have found a clinic and gotten the whole thing over with, only then I still believed that it would just go away if I ignored it. Or that it wouldn’t be that bad. Or something. Now it was three days later and I was outside a hospital and I knew it was my last chance. Stupid uncommunicative hospitals in Italy.
“I hate Italy,” I told Marc. It might have been the first time I told him that but it wasn’t the last. I hated my body too and my occasional inability to deal with unknown situations. Sometimes I can be so forward and brave and then other times not. This was a not. I let the opportunity pass.
We headed back towards the two-kilometers-out-of-town point where we stopped to ask for directions from some folks who looked like climbers but turned out to be via ferrata-ists. We didn’t know where our climb was but we now knew where a via ferrata was (Strobel, 3/B). It was getting too late to do a long route with a two hour approach and we’d planned to do a via ferrata as a “rest day” the next day anyway. So we switched gears.
Heading straight uphill on yet another scree slope, I felt almost fit. We were cruising past the packs of old men. I’m not the slowest hiker on earth, just that much slower than Marc. He’s only 6-foot-something-ridiculous and young and fit and better acclimated and more of an alpine climber and . . . I’m sure there are other excuses I’m missing. At any rate, he’s a way, way faster hiker than I am. But I was really burning those old men.
At the top of the slope we put our via ferrata gear on, sneaking peaks at the old men to make sure we were doing it right. There’s a sort of Y thing that you clip in with – one locking biner on each arm – and then a metal thing-a-ma-bobby like a mini-figure 8 that this bit of rope runs through and then some extra rope that I suppose pulls through the mini-figure 8 if you fall to provide a dynamic catch. The trick was what to do with that extra rope.
I eventually decided that my attitude toward the via ferrata equipment needed to be something like the attitude of a guide towards his client. The climbing was so easy there was no way I was going to fall. Unless the via ferrata equipment made me. And it was trying. The extra rope gets caught around your knees and under your feet. The biners catch between the cable and rock, stopping you mid-move. Every ten feet you have to stop and unclip, clip, unclip, clip. We stopped locking the locking biners early on. Who has that kind of time? Every ten feet or so, unclip clip, unclip clip. Do three more moves of 5.0. Unclip, clip. Unclip, clip. Via ferrata would be a lot more fun if you just soloed the damned things.
In between rock sections, we had to hike. This first via ferrata was a difficulty 3 out of 6. The climbing was very easy and the sections tended to be short, separated by yet more hiking. But I was having a pretty good time.
And then the sudden uncontrollable urges struck. There I was, halfway between Marc and some old man, isolated on my segment of cable, and I was peeing my pants. I clutched at myself. Was that worse? As soon as I had myself under control I ran for the top, found the first bit of privacy, and let loose. A few segments later it happened again. I was out of tampons and whether it was my imagination or not, the situation was growing steadily worse.
We reached the summit and enjoyed the view, sharing some cheese and crackers for lunch. Marc said he thought it was the same summit we’d reach on the route we were trying to find and I said that, if so, the arete looked like complete and utter choss, but then much of the Dolomites does. He also said he’d figured out how to get to the start of the route from where we’d parked the car that morning. I believed him. He was a remarkably good navigator. Never wrong, whether by car or foot. I was learning to go where he pointed.
We started the descent. It was going to be early when we got down and with nowhere to go and nothing to do, I suggested we might as well do another via ferrata. Marc was way ahead of me (as usual). He’d already discovered that this via ferrata could be easily linked to another. He probably said something about the next one having a long descent but I wasn’t paying much attention. We were walking down a gentle slope at the time and down is always better than up.
We were curving around the back of the formation to the front again, towards a small dip between two towering walls of rock. In other words, a gully. “This is going to be bad, isn’t it?” I asked as we approached the rim to take our first look down. Ahead of us stretched a gravel filled gully, criss-crossed by switchbacks, and seemingly miles in length.
Actually, it was kind of fun. The gravel and loose dirt were deep enough that you slid more than slipped. Marc took off and literally ran down the thing while even I kept up a bit of a pace, trying to pretend I was skiing and wishing I actually knew how to ski. I reached the bottom where the gully choked down to a blockade of rocks and Marc waited for me. Beyond the brief blockage I saw another infinite stretch of gully. We were only about halfway down.
Finally we bailed out of the gully and started our climb back up to the next formation. It wasn’t so far away. That’s what I told myself. But the hill was steep and slippery again and when we reached the base of the rock we started climbing a ramp that was very much like climbing a steep, slippery hill. In fact, it *was* a steep, slippery hill. It was attached to the side of a nice piece of rock, but you didn’t touch the rock. You just hiked next to it.
The hiking went on and on as our ramp wound its way up and around the formation. This via ferrata (Terza Cenga) was only a difficulty level of 2, which apparently means no climbing at all. There was never even any noticeable need for the cables (though the route got a very stern seriousness rating of C) and we stopped clipping them after a while, using them as handrails just in case.
Fortunately, this wasn’t a long via ferrata. We made the extra climb up to the very summit, marked, as they all seemed to be, with a cross commemorating someone or else’s untimely death I suppose. It was another beautiful view though not much different from the last one. Then we started down.
It was a pleasant walk along the backside of the formation in a different environment than any of our previous hiking had been. Below us was a beautiful valley, surrounded by mountains. I think we had an area of several square miles all to ourselves. The greenery was lush, the weather perfect, the surroundings quiet and still. Then we came around the side of the formation and started walking through an alpine meadow with wildflowers and long grass flowing in the wind. Just beautiful.
But it was starting to feel hot and the water was getting low. It was around this time that Marc said the part about the long descent again and I actually listened. He was saying that the via ferrata was supposed to take six hours, of which only an hour and a half involved going up. We were doing a four and a half hour descent? Oh. My. God.
Most of the descent went sideways. We’d walked a long way across the formation, then a longer way across the back of another formation and now we had to walk all that same way across the front of both of them, not to mention that we’d traversed the width of the formation from the first via ferrata too. Once we hit level ground I could move fast enough to keep up with Marc, but we were out of water and the trail seemed endless. Still, we made it back to the car without a single mis-turn and with an hour left to kill before Italy would let us eat.
I was starting to get seriously annoyed with Italy’s restaurants. For starters, there was the lack of Starbucks or other to-go coffee shops which prevented me from getting my morning caffeine fix. Then there was the inconvenience of eating dinner according to their schedule, never our own. Most curiously was that we could never get a check. After waiting around, tired and bored, for up to twenty minutes after the last plate had been cleared, I’d always give up and march up to the cash register and demand to pay. I figured I was an American and therefore entitled to be rude and impatient, but I was worn-out from being rude and impatient every single night. I wished someone would bring me a check. (We eventually realized that going up to the cash register was actually the correct, non-rude thing to do.)
But most importantly, I was tired of Italian food. Sure the wine was cheap. And the food was fine. It was good. I mean, I’m not sure it was better than the Italian I can get from any pizza place in Connecticut but it was reasonably cheap (the only thing in Italy that was) and perfectly edible. But I was tired of it. I wanted Mexican, Chinese, Thai, Indian. What I really wanted was a margarita.
I also wanted some t-items, as my mother used to call them so as to avoid embarrassing me in front of my brothers. When Marc and I stopped at a grocery store so he could buy more bread and cheese for tomorrow’s summit lunch, I slunk around looking for the feminine hygiene aisle. I got tampons, badly needed, and some pads too. I hadn’t used sanitary napkins since my first period when I was thirteen, dismissing them as diapers. Only now I needed a diaper. I was pleased to discover that the technology had come a long way since I was a teenager. Those TV commercials where they pour blue liquid into the center of a pad and watch it miraculously wick away aren’t making it up. And they’re so thin now. Still feels like wearing a diaper but a slim, effective one.
There was something else I needed and it was even more embarrassing. I couldn’t find it and I couldn’t ask. I wandered the unfamiliar aisles in growing despair. Finally I found it – a tube of ointment with a picture of a naked cartoon baby pointing to his rear end, from which radiated lines clearly meant to indicate “ouch.” You see, I had a rash. As any baby can tell you, walking around in damp pants will do that to you.
After dinner, we found a campground just down the road from our intended objective, which was still the South-East Arete of Punta Fiames. I still had to face a two hour approach but after the day’s nearly endless hiking I figured I could do two hours without even breaking a sweat. Besides, Marc didn’t think it would be as much as two hours and I was inclined to agree with him. We’d made it from the parking lot to the very top of the exact same formation in not much more than two hours. How could it take a full two hours just to reach the start of the route? With my behind freshly soothed and diapered and visions of an easy, familiar approach dancing in head, I drifted off to sleep.
As soon as I took the first step uphill the next morning, I knew I was in trouble. Far from being acclimated and in shape, I was exhausted. My muscles didn’t hurt; they simply weren’t interested in moving. Marc, on the other hand, seemed faster than ever. We moved quickly through the familiar part of the approach and soon found ourselves in the promised dirty gully. Well, of course it was a dirty gully. What at the Dolomites isn’t?
There had been times on the previous days when all I had wanted in the world was to sit down and refuse to ever walk another step. Only the futility of such a move kept me from it. In most cases, going down was nearly as tedious as going up and at least if you kept moving forward somewhere in future there would be climbing. And I did still like climbing. It was becoming harder and harder to remember that as the difficulties surrounding the climbing mounted, but once I got to the rock I was always fine. As I made slow, disgruntled progress up the slope I would remind Marc of that, every half hour or so when I caught up to him sitting on a boulder taking pictures and waiting for me. “I’ll be fine once we start climbing,” I’d say and he’d say he knew that and then he’d get up and leap forward like a gazelle.
He had told me the first day that the secret was to keep moving, only more slowly. One foot in front of the other and pause on that foot and then move the next foot. So I slogged upwards, slowly but steadily, and as brutal as it felt that day I eventually made it to the base of the cliff. I smiled as we started traversing. Another approach down. Not.
The base of the cliff was only the first hour of the two hour approach. From there it was steeper dirty gullies, sometimes chimneys, and then small scree slopes up and down and then another dirty gully or chimney. Endlessly. We gained height as we traversed until it seemed we were going to walk up the entire formation again.
But finally we arrived. I let Marc take the first pitch because it was a chimney and I thought I might puke if I had to solo another chimney. But once I was following him and then swinging leads, everything came right again. It was a really nice route actually. First were several easy pitches to get up to a ledge from where we traversed over to the arete. The arete itself featured the hardest climbing we’d done so far and was beautiful, though to be fair you’re always climbing well on one side of the arete or the other so you can hardly call it an arete climb.
We made good time to the top and ate lunch on the same summit as the day before. He was right about that. Then we slid down the gravelly gully again and made it back to the car with at least an hour of daylight left. Our campground featured the same ubiquitous restarante/bar/pizzeria we could find in any town in Northeastern Italy, so there was no need to travel any further. I drank a great big beer (I was genuinely tired of red wine), ate a can of Pringles (for some reason widely available in Europe), and enjoyed a nice hot shower.
Over dinner we took a rational look at our options. The Brenta Dolomites, closer to Milan and therefore our original plan for our last climbing day, featured four hour approaches. At this point we both knew it was out of the question. We decided instead to spend both of our last days at Cinque Torre, the Dolomite’s answer to cragging. Short approaches (less than half an hour), short routes (three to five pitches) and clusters of pretty towers to wander between. We’d stay in the nearby refugio the next night and get another half day of climbing in on our last day before heading back towards Milan. It sounded like heaven.
Our first route, Torre Grande South Summit Via Miriam (V+, 4 pitches), was our hardest yet and very nice. V+ roughly translates to 5.8 and I felt challenged by it. I was getting some gear in (and carrying something closer to my normal rack for the first time on the trip) but I didn’t feel great about falling on it. The slickness of the polished rock leaves you wondering about the holding power of any cam, and the loose and fractured nature of the rock makes other gear suspect as well.
Now for the hard part: getting down. Boy did we make a mess out of that. I won’t go into all the details but we nearly killed ourselves plus a lot of innocent bystanders who were cringing in fear from the avalanche of loose rock we kept raining down in their vicinity. A nice German-speaking man tried to explain where we ought to be but a) we couldn’t understand him and b) we couldn’t get back to where he was telling us to go without causing further damage. In the end we left some gear and rapped off. It should have been our easiest descent but it was the one we made the biggest mess of.
Determined to avoid any further ascents of Torre Grande, which was too bad because it’s an awsome formation, we traversed around to the Torre Barancio North Face (IV, 4 pitches). By now I could walk neither uphill nor downhill without swearing. My legs were too tired to keep me balanced as I slid down another endless scree slope so I arrived at the start of the route already grumpy. We couldn’t locate the bolts from the ground and I ranted about soloing yet another pitch of 5.4. “I hate Italy” was a phrase used more than once.
Marc offered to lead the pitch but I felt bad enough about the temper tantrums so I started up with a promise to climb back down if I reached the alcove without running into a bolt. Then Marc suggested I move to my right and I found myself staring at the “bolt” (not quite what we could call a bolt and disguised with white paint besides). I clipped it happily. From there, the route was a pleasure, both up and down.
The low-lying clouds that had surrounded us on the first day had returned. All over Cinque Torre people were packing up and leaving but now that we were climbing up and rapping down, I was cheerful enough for another route. So we ran up Torre Lusy, North Face (IV, 5 pitches). It was another beautiful face route followed by some more uncomplicated rappels down. A beautiful finish to the day and, as it turned out, our trip.
The refugio was full, so we went back down to our now-familiar campground. It turned out to be the right decision anyway because we woke to rain, but I was disappointed about never spending a single night in a refugio. The funny thing was that I almost hadn’t brought the tent. We hadn’t been sure we’d need it and I threw it in at the last minute.
The rain cancelled the last half day of climbing. We started our drive back to Milan, taking a less scenic but considerably faster route this time. I dropped Marc off to continue his adventures and spent the night in a nice hotel. Luxury. Same damned Italian food though.
I flew home with two pressing needs on my mind: antibiotics and a margarita. And boy did they both hit the spot.
Photos on Marc’s site