We cheated!
Rule 1 of the Rules of Walking clearly states:
1. No wheels allowed (no cars, no trains, no bicycles, etc.), except to return home at the end of the trip.
The yeah-but that I forgot to include was--as the preceding two days had taught us--
Exceptions: Thunderstorms in the mountains aren't to be messed with.
It wasn't exactly thundering on Sunday morning, but thunderstorms were in the forecast, and it had been raining steadily since the previous night. S insisted he was OK with just putting on the rain gear and getting wet [← this is called foreshadowing; remember this for Day 13. --Eds.], but Carly and I didn't want to hike across open meadows on a high pass for a few hours to see if lightning was going to strike or not.
So we took a bus.
Not only that, but the bus ride was FUN. Like being on a gondola without being up in the air, curving from switchback to switchback all the way down into San Martino di Castrozza. High cushy seats, great windows, temperature controlled, dry, just soggy us and the bus driver--it was excellent.
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| Some of the many switchbacks |
Down in San Martino, we saw evidence of what major storms can do, particularly re. hail damage.
What the... This is a big pile of hail stones. We suspect the city swept the streets and dumped all the hail into this ditch, but maybe it all landed here when it fell from the sky.
We were briefly tourists in San Martino. Get this: it's such a touristy place that STORES WERE OPEN ON A SUNDAY. Will wonders never cease?
More hail damage:
We didn't hear any thunder the entire bus ride down, but it did continue to rain. We put on our rain gear...
and headed up the hill toward Rifugio Petina.
To be honest, we were both expecting the hiking drama to dwindle: we were past our highest planned peaks, and mainly aiming to get to the end of the Alps. We thought the next few days would be a denoument from the higher Dolomites. Turns out this wasn't the case. The mountains looked different, but they were still varied and lush and offered a continuous stream of good views. Also turns out we had been hiking through a national park since the day before, and would remain in national park until just before we arrived in Feltre.
Up the steep hillside and into the woods we went...
Most of these trees are dead. Bark beetles.
Eventually we emerged into wildflower-filled meadows.
A sign advertised the Primiero Dolomiti marathon. It's 4,073 feet up, 5,062 feet down. Some changes were made to the course "after the dramatic storm of October 2018."
More bark beetle damage. Lots of trees were dead, and many had already been cleared.
Wild orchid.
This looked similar to the purple orchids, but the leaves are different. iNaturalist says it's some type of betony.
Because we had shaved 5 miles off our day's hike by taking the excellent bus, after reaching Rifugio Petina, we decided to try to recoup the loss by walking down to the village Siror and back up again, 7 miles total. But wouldn't you know it, smack dab in the middle of our descent we got caught in a thunderstorm. We weren't the highest things around, and we probably could have made it to Siror without any problems, but it felt safer to turn around instead. So 3 bonus miles instead of 7, oh well.
After dinner, we played fetch with the refuge dog.
Oh! And we saw our first Alpengluehen--indeed, our only Alpengluehen--of the entire trip, illuminating Monte Pavione, our destination two days hence.
In the other direction, illuminated clouds. Not super dramatic, but very welcome after all the rain.
A room with a view:
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