I can’t believe no one snored last night in our 10 person dorm. Someone closed the window and I woke up at 3:00 sweating. Who likes sleeping in the hot? I don’t get it.
We got up at 6:30 which was plenty of time to do everything else before breakfast started at 7:00. The breakfast wasn’t bad. It was a buffet of breads, jams, some cheese, ham, hard boiled eggs, yogurt, muesli, tea and coffee. We made sure to eat our fill so we could make it to lunch with minimal snacking. I even had two cups of tea which felt like a real luxury.
So on paper we had about 10 hours of walking to do before 18:00. We left the hut just before 8:00, back into immediately beautiful scenery. The common breakfast time meant most people were leaving around the same time. We got out in front of most of them, so it was fairly quiet on the trail. We had a beautiful traverse followed by our first pass of the day. The pass was fairly steep, but the trail was so good and the views were unmatched.
At the top, we descended for a bit into another valley, then climbed up again via a ridge to a plateau. The plateau was covered in lush grass, and now we had a giant canyon in front of us. The steep canyon walls were stunning and we walked around it on the plateau. It reminded me of the Grand Canyon, but not nearly as big and instead of a desert at the top, we had green grass as far as the eye could see.
The plateau wound us around to our first hut and we arrived at 11:30, just as the kitchen was opening for lunch. We ordered lunch and it arrived insanely quickly. I had a sausage with potatoes, while Zoë had pasta with ragu sauce. Zoë’s was definitely the better deal, but after 2 days of paying €30 for lunch, I wish I would have brought food for lunch for every day. The food is not fantastic and we’re already eating meals in them for breakfast and dinner anyway. Oh well. Advice for someone else like me I guess.
After lunch, we didn’t know how long we had left but we did the first part in around 3.5 hours. Our guidebook said both sections should take 5 hours so we figured we had somewhere between 3.5 and 5 hours of hiking left. There are frequent signs on the trail that list times to various destinations. If your destination happens to be on them, they are much better predictors of how long a section will take. They’re a great feature of this trail. We still typically beat those estimates by a bit, but they’re much closer to reality than the guidebook we have. The guidebook is pretty unnecessary and I wouldn’t recommend anyone get one.
Our walk continued along the plateau. There were tons of people walking towards us after lunch. I guess they were coming to the hut for lunch as it was now noon. It made walking a bit slow going as we constantly had to pull over to let people pass, in addition to trying to pass people going our same direction, who seem insistent on being oblivious to those behind them. We had some climbs up to minor ridges and the views continued to impress. The trail quality remained exceedingly high. The weather was perfect. I can’t say enough good things about how this hike is going so far.
Eventually we reached a road crossing which was a zoo with people. It’s not hard to see why, it was beautiful. As we were hiking up the other side of the valley away from the road, I couldn’t help but think that the revving of sports car and motorcycle engines was the ultimate irony. Nothing says “fuck this place” quite like simultaneously destroying any sense of tranquility with a roaring engine while needlessly polluting the planet with that sweet acceleration. But at least those drivers felt cool.
Up next we had our first via ferrata section. These define the Alta Via 2 and set it apart from other, ordinary hikes. These are steep sections near the top of passes that have cables and metal rungs you can use to assist yourself up and over the pass. Some people carry extra gear to help with this, like a lightweight harness and a special cabling system. We opted to just get some gardening gloves at the recommendation of our friend Matt, back home. Shoutout to Matt, those gloves were an excellent recommendation.
Before the via ferrata started, we had a steep ascent, which took a bit of time. Many people were descending and thankfully, most of them were off the via ferrata section by the time we got there. If it’s annoying to wait for tons of people passing by on the trail, it’s doubly so to figure it out in the via ferrata sections. Many of the via ferrata portions had two parallel cables, presumably one for descending people and the other for people ascending. There were even arrows painted on the ground, seeming to indicate this but most people ignored it. Thankfully most groups stuck to a common side, so passing groups was at most a matter of just hopping over to the other cable.
We ascended the cables, iron steel rungs, and rock by pulling ourselves along or just walking when the terrain wasn’t so steep. Most people had the via ferrata kits that clipped them to the cables, which made sense. The part that made less sense was that once you started using one, it was easy to get tunnel vision and keep clipping in to the next cable, even when the steepness of the trail probably didn’t warrant it. When we passed someone on the way up by walking by him, he seemed to take notice and abandoned his previous, fastidious clipping to the cables and walked with us. It was actually quite fun and felt a bit like an obstacle course. It was longer than I expected, but when it was over I think it was the most fun we’d had all day.
The top was another spectacular plateau, overlooking the valley we had just crossed. We stood for a bit and took in the phenomenal views. Our hut was only 5 minutes away, and we arrived with plenty of time, sometime around 16:00. There was a nice turquoise lake adjacent to the hut, which seemed to make an impossibly beautiful place more so. What a fantastic hike, what a great place to be.