Arco

Arco is a small town on the side of a large lake in the north of Italy, at this time of year it’s crowded with caravans, campers, and tourists who come to enjoy the lake. Liam and I arrived stinky and hot after 2 days sleeping out in squats and in need of a good shower. However, unfortunately the only camp sites in town were the European tourist campsites that they have here. They are like little villages, packed wall to wall with pre-fabricated tents and usually include swimming pools, supermarkets, restaurants and everything you could ever need. However they come at a high price and are outside the budget of climbing bums.

Castle on the Arco lake

After asking some climbers coming away from a crag, Liam and I found out about a secret climbers accommodation. There was a little farm yard where the farmer didn’t mind smelly climbers squatting in his fields. This became our home for 4 days, shared with another group of Czech climbers. Each night we would sleep either amongst the grape vines or under the shelter of a small hut.

Climbing wise, we slowly worked our way through the area, sometimes doing some hard climbing and sometimes easy. The highlight was one morning we went out and climbed a 450m route overlooking the village. This was the longest climb both Liam and I had ever done and was a fantastic day out. Not too difficult, but just cruising up the cliff. We sat on a small ledge and had lunch in the sunshine and it really captured what I like about climbing, just being out there on the wall.

Welcome to Italy

Parete Zebrata, 450m of goodness

The Dolomites

The Italian dolomites exist in a seeming paradox where more people speak German here than Italian…even though we were still 100km from the Austrian border. In fact it used to be part of Austria until Napoleon invaded and gave it to Italy.

We arrived here with no real idea of where to go. We had guide books but it was almost impossible to pick out what peak we wanted to climb and where. We tried asking at the Club Alpine Italian where we got shuffled through a series of beautiful old offices and past a bar full of old mountaineers drinking wine at 10am before speaking to the manager of the club. With a lot of discussion in semi-Italian he said we were in off-season and everything still had too much snow. But we were not deterred.

First stop was Mt Marmolada which to our disappointment was not made of marmalade, but the biggest mountain in the range. Unfortunately we found that it was closed. That is to say we were between seasons, the winter ski season was finished and the summer walking season was yet to begin. All the shops were closed, no lifts were working (there is normally summer skiing here) and there was not a lot to be done. However, this did not daunt us and we went up the first morning to take a little stroll. Soon we were groin deep in wet soggy snow, but being the stubborn people that we are we pushed on. By the end of the day we had completed a fantastic training walk that entirely convinced us that we could not stay and climb in this area.

"Bush walking" in the Marmolada area

Venice

Thus now we had been climbing for about 3 weeks and feeling a little burnt out we decided to play tourist and drove down to Venice. Although we had not been staying so high it was high enough to be above the snowline mostly, it was amazing to come down off the mountains and feel the warmth soak back into our bodies. This was of course helped by the beer, slices of pizza and Gondola rides. We spend a day and a half wandering around the back streets of Venice and soaking up the atmosphere and revitalising ourselves before we moved back up to give the Dolomites a second go.

Evening in Venice

The Dolomites take 2

This time we drove up to Belluno to head into the mountains. We arrived at about 5pm and decided that for one reason or another we would pack our bags straight away and walk up to a high hut where we could base ourselves for 4 days. We drove long and hard into the night with massive packs full of gear and finally pulled into the hut at 11pm exhausted and sweaty. We stayed in the end for 2 days in the Winter Room of the 7th Alpini Hut, which is a room they keep open for safety reasons and for people who are travelling during winter. We had this cosy little 2 story building to ourselves.

After a lazy start, the next morning we stared up a Via Ferrata route. Via Ferrata is a cousin to rock climbing, but very different. It involves a mix of climbing and scrambling up cliffs equipped with metal spikes, wires, ladders and other accoutrement. Our plan was to complete a traverse of the range, however as we drove higher and higher we realised we might run into problems. We were encountering more and more snow and soon we had to start doing sections un-protected because the cabling was buried under ice. I took a pause half way up to take a phone interview and then Liam and I unfortunately had to make the decision to descend down…Turned away again by snow!

Via Ferrata in the Dollomites

Bizarre story 4: You want me to build what where?

The next morning as we lay in bed, listening to the wind in the trees and the deer skipping around outside and we heard an approaching noise. Louder and louder it became until eventually it sounded like it was on top of us. We scrambled outside to see a helicopter dropping 3 people 100m away from us. They were being flown in to construct a chair lift up to a little mountain hut. Over the next 3 hours as we sat and drank coffee, they flew in load after load of concrete to fill a pylon. Soon the novelty wore off and we did the 5hr walk out down to the car and headed north.

The day of many lands

North we drove towards Austria, we slept in a farmer’s field near the border and then skipped over into Austria for breakfast. All of a sudden the light fluffy bread and sweet pastries of the Mediterranean was gone and the bread took on a heavy dark look. It was an amazing change. However, Austria didn’t hold our interest for long and we pushed into Lichtenstein (to eat lunch and send post-cards to our selves…apparently it’s the done thing) and then over into Switzerland. Soon everything was clean and ordered, the cows had bells on, we exchanged our euros for Swiss Franks and every one became agonizingly nice. We were here to visit a friend of mine and shelter for a couple of days in a house (gasp!). We had an excellent 3 days with Mathew eating fine Swiss cheese, visiting a cheese making factory, trying to climb (pushed back by snow…again) and profiting well for finally having a roof above our heads. We even cooked a lamb roast one evening, opened a bottle of Penfolds and sipped down some VBs while watching the sun set over flowing green fields.