So our hotel was fine but somehow worse than the Refugios, despite being on a road with access to regular amenities. At breakfast this morning, they had plenty of food but somehow I didn’t want to eat any of it. I think the quality of everything was just a little too low and I wasn’t up for stuffing myself.
By the time we left it was 8:45. This was our short day. We should have no problem getting to our next Refugio, Volpi al Mulaz, before 18:00. We left our hotel, walking along a narrow shoulder of road as cars whizzed by. It was a popular area, but there wasn’t great options for pedestrians. We took a trail that had us climb up ski slopes. There was not a cloud in the sky so we got to see what we couldn’t yesterday. We may have missed more than I thought yesterday, walking in the clouds.
At the top of the ski hill, we joined a dirt road that quickly became very crowded. Everyone was walking the opposite direction to us, which was nice. I’m not really sure where they were going. The mountains around us were really nice, but getting more distant.
We came across a road with a Refugio and a parking lot that was full of cars. I think it was around 10:30 and we didn’t really feel like stopping, even though it was going to be our only intermediate Refugio for the day. Instead we decided to keep going. In the absence of a decision, we choose to keep walking, I guess.
Immediately after the Refugio the trail took a dramatic turn upward. We climbed, in my opinion, unnecessarily steeply, given that everything prior had been so mild. The nice part was, it was over quickly. We were on a ridge where we’d meander up and down for a while. The views got better as we walked along the ridge, which brought us closer to the mountains. The temperature was still fantastic. I think I checked a temperature map of Western Europe yesterday and I’m glad we’re in the Alps. I’m not sure I could handle it anywhere else.
The ridge descended across a scree field which had a bunch of goats. These goats had large horns but I don’t think they were ibexes. They were right next to the trail and not too disturbed by our presence so I snapped some photos as we passed by. After the scree field, we had some steep climbing with some cables to assist us. We stashed our poles and donned our gardening/work gloves. Those gloves really help because they make grabbing cables or rock effortless. We passed some people who weren’t wearing gloves and they were really struggling.
The section didn’t really need cables for most of it. Perhaps in inclement weather they would be more useful. It was easier to just scramble up the rocks and ignore the cables and instead focus on the dozens of places you could move your hands and feet, rather than the sometimes awkward locations you had to use if you constrained your hands to the cables. We scrambled up the rocks, knowing that our end was probably near.
At the top of the rock scramble, we saw our hut. We arrived sometime around 13:30, I think. We hadn’t yet eaten lunch, so we planned to eat one of our packed lunches at the hut. We did so, after they let us check in and we left our packs upstairs. We sat outside in the crowded picnic tables in the direct sun, using it to dry our sweaty clothes. The shower here is €8 so my plan is to wait until we finish in 3 more days before I shower again. Even if I can’t shower, it’s much nicer to have dry clothes.
Since it’s only 15:00, I might have a nap now, although I’m a bit worried I won’t sleep well tonight if I do. Maybe Zoë will wake me up and prevent me from ruining my night.
We tried to handle a bunch of logistical things yesterday in the hotel but the WiFi was pretty shit. We’re working through some plans to visit with our parents in November and December, so we’re trying to book transportation and accommodation. It’s hard enough to do that for just us, but now we’ve got more constraints to deal with and with shitty internet it’s extra hard. I’m hopeful those 3 weeks will be fun, once we get through the planning phase.