Hut to Hut Above Val Gardena
Four days on foot from Seceda over the Puez-Odle to Colfosco: early starts, afternoon thunder, cold tarns and a great deal of scree.
Clara likes to say I plan walks the way other people plan weddings. This one I barely planned at all. We had four days at the end of June, a pair of boots each, and a rough line on the map from Ortisei across the Puez-Odle to Colfosco in Val Badia, sleeping in mountain huts on the way. The only rule we kept was the one everyone gave us: start early and be indoors by two, because the afternoons belong to the thunder.
The evening we arrived in Ortisei the cloud was down on Sassolungo, and we walked up to St Jakob’s church above the town in a light that couldn’t decide whether to rain. It is one of the oldest churches in the valley, plain and white on its meadow, and from the bench beside it you can watch the whole of Val Gardena switch its lights on. We could not see a single summit. Clara said this was a good sign. I still don’t know what she meant.
Day one: down from Seceda
We cheated on the first climb and took the cable car to Seceda, which put us at the top of the day before most of the valley had finished breakfast. From there the walking runs down and outwards across the Mastlé pastures: long green slopes, hay barns, small tarns with reeds at their edges, and the Odle standing along the north side like a row of broken teeth.
By the second tarn I had stopped taking the map out. The paths are well signed and well trodden, and in late June the meadows are loud with crickets and cowbells. The hut that night was full: a long table of walkers comparing blisters in four languages, and a family from Bergamo who had been on the move for a fortnight and looked fresher than we did.
Days two and three: into the stone
Above the pastures the green runs out quickly. The second morning took us up a steep scree gully to the Forcella de Sieles and on to the Puez plateau, which is less a plateau than a high, tilted desert of grey rubble and strange layered towers. You spend a lot of time looking at your feet.
The thunder arrived exactly when promised, at about half past two, while we were drying socks on the veranda of the Puez hut. It rolled around the basin for an hour, hail bounced off the railings, and then the sky cleared to a hard, rinsed blue. Clara watched a man in sandals come in off the hill soaked to the knee and said nothing at all, which for her is a kind of speech.
On the third morning we crossed the Cir pass among pale limestone pinnacles and dropped to the Gardena Pass, where the motorbikes come as a shock after two days of near silence. Looking west from the road, the Plans de Frea run down towards Sassolungo, all haybarns and wildflowers.
Above the pass, Val Setus climbs straight into the Sella towards the Pisciadù hut. We looked at it for a long time, agreed it would keep for another year, and walked down to Colfosco instead.
Day four: lying down
We spent the last day doing as little as possible on the Alpe di Siusi, the great high meadow south of Ortisei, where the cows have better views than most hotels.
Notes
- Huts fill early for July and August; book ahead and bring a sleeping-bag liner.
- Afternoon storms are routine in early summer, so aim to finish walking by early afternoon.
- Buses cross the Gardena Pass in summer, which makes a one-way walk easy to undo.
- Cash is still useful at some of the smaller huts.
