Chomping at the bit

After our long summer hikes, I'm usually okay until mid-October. Then I start obsessively plotting and pining for the next hikes. Komoot is my best friend once winter hits, enabling hours of fantasizing. In January and February, we align all of our ducks--routes, huts and rifugios and hotels, and transportation to and from. Then we wait. And fantasize. And wait some more, chomping at the bit, until summer comes.

Our goal this summer is to finish crossing the Alps. When I google "crossing the Alps," I learn we already did that last summer, since "crossing" means crossing over the highest range. Last summer, we crossed over the Brenner Pass to Sterzing, so yeah, we've already crossed the Alps. 

But we're choosing to interpret "crossing" as entering the Alps from the north and exiting from the south. 

This year, the plan is to start where we left off last year, in Sterzing, and hike through parts of the Dolomites to Feltre. Feltre isn't quite at the southern edge of the Alps, but it's flat enough for us to say "close enough" after 13 days of hiking. We considered other end points, including Venzone and Verona, but we couldn't include Dolomites and still pack the whole route into two weeks. At some point, I got tired just thinking about hiking longer than that.

Chomp chomp

We're following the same Rules as in previous years. Transportation via train, bus, or car is allowed only at the endpoints, to get to and from the hike itself. During the hike, transportation assistance is limited to modes that make acrophobes weak in the knees--i.e. exposure therapy. Our planned route thus includes a few gondola lifts plus one funicular.

Because obsessing on Komoot gives me something to do while I pine for this hike, I've also plotted out escape routes, in case it snows in June or we're exhausted or a mountain crumbles. It's good to have options.

For a while, I fantasized about hiking all the way from Steinebach to Greece, over, say, ten years. While researching this idea this past fall, my plans stalled in the mountains along the Croatian coastline. The Croatian Long Distance Trail is relatively new--still new enough that I don't think we could do it without camping along the trail, which is illegal (in theory, though clearly people do it). I suspended the idea when I read a 2021 blog post by a hiker who held their breath while walking through a kilometer-long unmaintained stretch known to have landmines left over from the Bosnian War. Older maps of the European long-distance E6 trail, which overlaps in parts with the Croatian Long Distance Trail and the Via Dinarica, show a route running from Finland all the way to Greece; more recent maps end in southern Croatia and connect to Greece with ferries. Maybe this summer's hike will motivate me to revisit this...