Into The Dolomites

We woke up this morning at 7:45am. We’d had a pretty good nights sleep even though we were a little worried about being moved on. After a quick cup of tea we put the bed away and opened the blinds so it looked like we hadn’t slept here, then had another cup of tea whilst Ellie used Atlas Obscura to see if there was anything in the nearby vicinity worth checking out that wasn’t on the list.
After our second cup of tea we got dressed and Ellie had found an unusual place to hike to quite nearby and we programmed that into the sat nav and at 9am we left.
It was a short journey of just 15 miles up the the side of a mountain to get to our first destination and Wanda handled the climbing wonderfully considering we’re fully loaded.
At 10am we came to the parking lot and paid €4 to park for the day and then we set off on a 1.5 mile hike through some woods up a very steep hill for about 200 meters until it plateaued off and then we were on relatively flat ground.
The woods were beautiful, with thick pine trees all around us and it’s obviously a nature area for kids as the trees had hands painted around them encouraging you to hug them. Ellie did that.
Then we came to an area by a stream and there were hundreds of piles of standing stones and in an open area amongst the trees there were stone circles, mini sculptures and even a giant nest in. Of course Ellie sat in that too.
We carried on hiking and as we came out of the woods we were in the clouds and could hardly see a thing. It was unbelievable watching them blow across the landscape and mountains and trees in the background appearing from nowhere and then disappearing again.
Finally after 30 minutes of hiking we came to the place we had found. The Earth Pyriamds of Platten.
These are giant hoodoos and rarely found in nature although we have visited monstrous ones in Bryce Canyon, Utah and even visited some in southern France last year.
These particular Hoodoos, or earth pyriamds started to form at the end of the ice age about 12,000 years ago when glaciers were in this region of Italy. The flowing movement of the glaciers and the high pressure of the ice ground the soft rocks ( sandstone) to powder. All of the hard rock and stone, mainly granite remained intact and eventually settled at the side of the melting glaciers in layers.
Rumours say that these earth pyramids were formed in the year 1812 during a freak thunderstorm that washed away part of the side of the mountain leaving behind the standing structures we see today.
Even though the pyramids were shrouded in clouds they made for a magnificent photo giving an other worldly view, it really was spectacular and we spent a good hour there watching the clouds blown past revealing hidden pyramids and trees in the distance.
We took a slow walk back to Wanda and then we had lunch of Wanda toasties and a cup of tea. We had time to kill today as the next 2 places on our list were temporarily closed and it wasn’t worth heading to the Passo Gaiu today because of the low cloud.
In the end we decided to drive through the mountain passes to Cortina and just stop whenever we wanted and we set our first destination of Fort Tres Sassi, this is an old world war 1 fort used from 1914-1919 and it was next on our list but was temporarily closed but we headed there to park in the car park.
All the way there we were climbing finally topping out at a height of 2168 at the summit of the Valparola Pass. Here we got out took some photos and Ellie met some smiley German campers who told us that we should be alright sleeping anywhere in Italy unless it says no camping which was great to hear.
Then we jumped back in Wanda and headed down the 12% gradient of the Valparola Pass and towards the town of Cortina.
5 miles from Cortina we found a huge car park for the ski lifts that are currently redundant and it was completely empty so at 3:30pm we decided to park up and call it a day.
We are half a mile from the small town of Pocol and that will be my starting point for the most famous climb I’ve ever ridden in real life tomorrow, the Passo Gaiu.
From 3:30pm we pretty much just looked out of the window watching the clouds reveal things that hadn’t been there 5 minutes ago. It’s a bizarre feeling when we know we are completely surrounded by mountains but can barely see any of them most of the time. Some of the taller ones we haven’t seen atall, but we know they are there.
At 5:30pm Ellie made us a great dinner of chicken wraps and then we settled in for the night. The evening was strange as we didn’t really have any sun to speak of today so there was no real sunset and the cloud all around us just got darker and darker gradually erasing our view of everything until it was pitch black.Read more