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.
Surprise!
How timely that BigJimSlade added the “missing day” post today, just when I need an OTR post that is not part of the current OTR post clusterfuck. The site devs are trying to figure out if there is a way to fix the OTR posts that got mangled in the merge, including all the previously submitted as yet unpublished posts.
BigJimSlade
Hi everybody! About six months ago, I posted a (5-day) week’s worth of pictures from our previous summer’s trip to Ortisei in Val Gardena. Seeing as how we just got back from France and Switzerland a couple weeks ago, I better get this posted so I can catch up to this year’s trip! (And yes, we got Covid on the way back – for us it’s been like a head cold, some tiredness lingers…)
On this day we took the bus that runs up and down the valley (you get a free pass from your hotel/guest house) up to Passo Sella, then started the trail that goes around Sassolungo and Sassopiatto. Besides where we got off, a gondola unloads a throng pretty regularly. We weren’t looking for a big hike that day, so we just went 2-3 miles, then turned around, against the tide.
Some little forget-me-nots. They are tiny and I love them.
Gentians are my other favorite, and I like the little scenes in the rocks.
Sassolungo (left) and Sassopiatto (right), with these little telephone booth, or vertical coffins, for gondolas going up the hut at the pass. That was one option for hiking – you could hike around to the far side, up to the hut, then take this back down.
All over these mountains, there are crosses at the top. Often related to WWI. But some crazy climbers put one memorial niche right in the middle of the rock face. These are the people who made these trails, climbed these mountains, made insane via ferrata…
This is nice wide panorama from where the big gondola (not that little phone booth thing) disgorges the hordes. I don’t know how it was decided, but we were all going clockwise around the mountain.
A pretty common, and photogenic, bluebell.
Looking back the way we came, and Piz Boè and the Sella group.
A look at Marmolada, the biggest mountain in the Dolomites. (While we were in Switzerland a couple weeks ago, it had an avalanche that killed almost a dozen people!)
eclare
That last photo is gorgeous!
Benw
very cool!
HinTN
@eclare: As is the one of Sassolungo and Sassopiatto!
eclare
@HinTN: Yes! It’s amazing how these mountains seem to pop-up out of nowhere.
Wag
Excellent. Did you climb any of the via ferrata routes? Bucket list item for me to do so.
OzarkHillbilly
I’d have gone in the other direction, just because.
Kristine
One of the locations in Europe I want to visit. Thank you for the photos. Glad your Covid cases were mild.
MelissaM
Lovely! Because of your series, hubbo and I decided to do the Dolomites next summer. BIL is a vocal coach in The Netherlands and participates in an annual music festival held in Mezzano (which is nearby). Our plan is to hike, then hook up with him and his husband at the end of the festival and do some traveling in Austria. That’s the grand scheme, the pipe dream. We’ll see what actually happens. But it was due to your hiking pictures. The serendipity that BIL will be nearby was just the chefs kiss. So thank you for that.
cope
Stunning pictures of a spectacular part of our world. Thanks.
eclare
@MelissaM: What a wonderful story!
apieceofpeace
I’m sold. Not many years left to seriously hike so looking to fit a Dolomites trip into schedule. Thanks for these dynamic photos.
Bill Arnold
Very nice photos.
Forget-me-nots are the one flower I have never gotten any Canon point-and-shoot (like 5 over the years) to focus on. Any tips, anyone?
BigJimSlade
@Bill Arnold: If you’re close enough to them hold your hand (or a twig with a leaf) next to them and maybe it can focus on that. (You know, press halfway down, then move your hand, or twig, back out of the way before pressing all the way down.)
BigJimSlade
@Wag: Nope, though on this last trip we had to do 2 short ladders – no big deal.
Since my knees are crap, and that makes it harder to balance in tough circumstances, I don’t really go for the via ferrata – I stop just short of that. But 20 years ago I would’ve been thrilled! I mean, I can hike up and down 2,000 – 3,000 feet, but big steps on rocks with a lot of pressure on the knee doesn’t really work anymore for me :-(
BigJimSlade
@MelissaM: Sounds great 👍!
I got interested because I kept seeing pictures of Tre Cime when I would open a new browser tab, thanks to the Flickr extension. Then I read about the area – cheaper than Switzerland; craggy, fantastical mountains, relatively accessible – and we started making plans :-)
BigJimSlade
@apieceofpeace: really try to plan it and do it!
BigJimSlade
Thanks everybody for the nice comments!
For those interested in a few logistical details, on our trip to Cortina, we flew into Venice, rented a car, and used that to access the trailheads. In Ortisei, we flew into Milan (just because it was cheaper), rented a car, but then only used the bus to get around there (and a few gondolas, so that can be an extra something to budget for).
BigJimSlade
Oh, I see in my description I got my left and right mixed up for Sassolungo and Sassopiato – dang.
StringOnAStick
@Wag: If you want the via ferrata experience but can’t get to Europe. the Jackson Hole ski area has some, as do the Colorado towns of Ouray and Telluride. They are all private so you have to use their guiding service. Excellent routes; I’ve done a full day of via ferrata at Jackson Hole and it was excellent.
Tehanu
Lovely pix, thank you!