Dolomites
Not far from the Dolomites tourist trails, the Marmarole welcome fewer visitors than they deserve. Charlie Jarvis joins a historic section of the Alta Via 5 – Strada Sanmarchi – in the hoofprints of four-legged guides
IT’S THE SOUND of falling rocks that we notice first.
Somewhere in the vast glacial bowl where we’re walking, there’s a sudden knock and a clatter. We stop and look around, across the scree and rubble, scanning for the source of the echo.
Of course, we can’t pick it out until it moves once more: the confident, patient form of a camoscio.
Once it notices us, the camoscio – better known as a chamois – shrieks. It’s a strained, high-pitched bark, a sound at odds with the animal’s soft, unostentatious form. It skips lightly down static streams of broken rock, before turning to watch us move far less certainly through the clutter at our feet. It shrieks once more, as if to mock our unsteadiness, then picks its easy route and skips out of sight amongst the shards of the mountain.
THE HARDEST OF MOUNTAINS?
We set off into the Marmarole beneath an unfamiliar blue sky. My girlfriend Giulia and I have already spent a week in the Italian Dolomites in sight of these mountains, whose summits have been draped in swirling cloud. Today, however, the sky is clear and the air cool, and their rough, crumbling peaks stand in the sun, magnificent and daunting.
“The hardest of mountains, without water, without shelter,” wrote Toni Sanmarchi, the first man to plot a route from east to west across this wildest range of the Dolomites, in 1946. Today, the ‘Strada Sanmarchi’ is part of the Alta Via 5, a long-distance route stretching from Val Pusteria on the border with Austria down to Pieve di Cadore. In its entirety, this ‘high route’ is one of the more challenging in the Dolomites. The section we’re taking from Auronzo to San Vito di Cadore – Sanmarchi’s path across the Marmarole – seems impervious, complex and volatile.
As in the rest of the high Dolomites, to navigate the Marmarole is to pick your way through a landscape in gradual collapse. One walks mainly on scree – ghiaione in Italian – a word whose sound,to my English ear at least, perfectly conveys the grind and strain of walking on steep slopes of mobile rock and gravel. Everything we place our feet on slips and dislodges, with potentially dangerous effect. After a thousand metres of ascent, we’ve already crossed the open wounds of two landslides, still fresh and not yet signposted. In the last decade, a bivacco – an Italian mountain shelter – was destroyed here in a landslide. And in 2019, a chunk of mountain smashed into the bedroom of a mountain inn.
As we navigate th
