On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
BigJimSlade
We took the bus (we didn’t use our car the whole week, except to drive back to Milan, plus lunch in Bergamo) up to Passo Gardena and walked Puez-Odle altopiano.
For those interested, we used Shorter Walks in the Dolomites by Gillian Price as our guidebook.
We walked up into a very craggy area, then across a high plateau (altopiano) to our lunch spot, then down into Vallunga (yes, long valley) and caught the bus back from Selva.
I had a ton of pictures from this day, so I will split this up into 2 posts, each with 4 landscapes and 4 flower pictures.
After getting off the bus and walking uphill a little bit, this is looking across the pass to the Sella group.
You get straight into this very craggy area, but you are right up in it, so it’s hard to get a great view of it (I should’ve taken a 360-degree pano). The guidebook describes this “a jungle of bizarre knobbly rock pinnacles.
In the middle of the picure, at the top of the scree that breaks up the cliffs across the way, behind the dark rock there is the Refugio Puez – our lunch spot.
Views to the east-ish.
Don’t think for a moment that I would just walk by this!
Some morning dew is left as the sun is just finding these flowers.
Some of those craggy rocks form the backdrop for this one.
I like flowers in the rock cracks.
Rusty
Thank you so much for sharing, these are wonderful. I am really enjoying the strange cragginess of the Dolomites.
zhena gogolia
Wow, beautiful.
HinTN
@Rusty: That cragginess is reminiscent of the Tetons for me and it is beautiful.
@BigJimSlade – what was the colorful field at bottom left of the first picture?
Mathguy
I usually see the Dolomites only during the Giro d’Italia, which hides their extraordinary beauty. Thanks for these great photos.
Kevin
Mountains are so great. As are little flowers that somehow decide to grow in little cracks of stone. Thanks for the pictures!
arrieve
Wow. Wow. I wish I could see this in person.
BigJimSlade
Hi everybody, here are the urls for bigger versions of these (copy/paste into a new browser tab or window). I’ll be back in about 90 minutes to respond more.
balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/P7050134-Pano.jpg
balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/P7050185-Pano.jpg
balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/P7050240.jpg
balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/P7050244-Pano.jpg
balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/P7050159.jpg
balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/P7050160.jpg
balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/P7050181.jpg
balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/P7050196.jpg
BigJimSlade
@HinTN: The first part of this hike is walking up around the top of some ski slopes, so probably that. On the other side of the road, they just cleared a bit of land and it’s now covered in grass.
BigJimSlade
@Kevin: I love trying to get the best picture of “little flowers in some rocky cracks” :-)
Kristine
Thank you for these photos. A long-term stay in this area is one of my dream vacations.
Mike S (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!)
Thanks for the pics. The Dolomites have long been on my bucket list as a lover of alpine plants and a life member of the North American Rock Garden Society. Little plants with big flowers growing amongst rocks are a thrill to see. Ever since I read the 1980’s reprint of Reginald Farrer’s book “The Dolomites, King Laurin’s Garden” from the late 1800s I’ve wanted to grow plants from there and also go see them of course. Growing them in our humid eastern US clime isn’t easy and they rarely look as good as they do in the wild so I’ve mostly quit torturing the seedlings from high altitude places like this and just admire them when we travel.
ID’ing plants from the Dolomites can be tricky even with good pics because te are numerous species that look similar and botanical nomenclature keeps changing too. Plus I have only learned many by Latin names. Yesterday’s pink flower with yellow centers was a primrose species (Primula sp.)
Today’s are a blue gentian species similar to Gentiana acaulis surrounded by heath flowers, white-flowered mountain avens (Dryas octopetala) which has a circum-polar distribution, a yellow buttercup (Ranunculus sp.), a little purple toadflax species (Linaria sp.)
BigJimSlade
@Mike S (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!): Thanks for the flower IDs!
Also, I might have to pick that book up!
J R in WV
I never cease to be amazed at the knowledge, experience and skills of Balloon Juice commenters. As shown so often by the On the Road pictures,, and commenters pitching with their own knowledge of the subjects of the photos.
Thanks for sharing these photos with us, amazing rocks, and flowers among the rocky scenes! We saw great alpine flowers in the Pyranees of NE Spain and SW France when we toured the cave paintings in those mountains. Also in Colorado high country on a long ago rock hunting trip. These posts bring back so many great memories!
StringOnAStick
The soil in the Dolomites is quite alkaline because the native rock is, well, dolomite, like limestone. It makes for a very specific kind of plant communities since most things prefer neutral soil and typically wetter mountain regions have more acidic soil. We hiked up high in the valleys around Corvara (next valley over) and in some high spots it was like the surface of the moon with a few oddly familiar and yet quite different plants. Thanks for reminding me of that wonderful trip!
RaflW
@BigJimSlade: They’re all beautiful, but the fourth one (P7050244) is just stunning!