Italian Alps

The path traversed the stream, and then mounted gently along the western side of the valley, through glades where wild strawberries and bilberries flourished in rare profusion. After the foot of the cliff had been passed, higher mountains towered on the south, and glimpses of the strange red pinnacles and white waterless gullies of the Sasso Rosso were caught from time to time through the floating vapours that wreathed them. A boundary stone marked the limit of the districts of Cles and Tione. As yet there was no sign of a watershed. In fact there appeared no reason why we need come to one at all. The ground rose sufficiently to hinder our seeing for any distance in advance, but still so gently that it might have gone on rising almost for ever. Deep boggy holes, which we crossed on causeways of decaying logs, while the ingenious mule picked his own way through the mud, interrupted the path. These were the difficulties of which our Parisian had warned us. Meantime the eastern range retreated further from us, and a stream flowed out from a broad valley at its base. At last the hillside sensibly steepened, and the forest grew less thickly. We overtopped the brow of the ascent and found ourselves on the edge of a vast undulating pasture. Barns and stables, too large to be called châlets, were sprinkled here and there. Frequent fences and gates suggested an English homestead. Sleek cows reposed contentedly on the grass, careless young heifers quarrelled and made it up again, while a couple of fussy donkeys raised a bray of welcome and galloped up to greet their half-brother in our train.

The highest point of the tableland of the Ginevrie Alp was our pass; from it the path dipped suddenly into a waterless dell. A few paces further brought us to the verge of the short steep descent whence we looked down on the meadows of Val Nambino and the tower of La Madonna di Campiglio. The path made a circuit to reach it, but we preferred a short cut, despite the warning of a priest who shouted after us that it was 'piu pericoloso.'

Before we went to bed it was decided that the mountaineers should set off next morning with Henri Devouassoud, a brother of the more celebrated François, in search of a route up the still maiden Cima di Brenta. Owing to various delays it was past five when we started. Our ideas as to the direction to be at first taken were rather crude, and had been rendered more so by the assurances of a German traveller we met overnight that there was no valley between the Val di Brenta and Monte Spinale.

Close to a second inn, a peasants' drinking-house, we left the road to Pinzolo for a terrace-path skirting the lower slopes of Monte Spinale. As we gradually turned the most projecting spur of the mountain, the lower portion of Val Nambino opened beneath us. The morning clouds were rapidly dispersing under the warm influence of the sun. High up in air, severed from the solid earth by a grey belt of yet undissolved mist, the great snow-plains of the Carè Alto shone in a golden glory such as that in which Mont Blanc veils himself when seen from a hundred miles' distance.60 Thin vapours still clung round the dolomites of the Bocca di Brenta, making their strange forms appear still more fantastic. Thus far our path had been gradually descending. Now a valley opened exactly where we looked for it at the south-eastern base of Monte Spinale. A timber-slide, which, if in good repair, forms the most luxurious of mountain-paths, avoiding all inequalities of ground, bridging chasms and mounting by an almost uniform gradient, led us up the glen which is known as the Vallesinella. Through breaks in the forest the glacier-crowned crags of the Cima di Brenta were now seen for the first time, followed on the north by an array of slender obelisks, beaks, and crooked horns, the strangeness of which would, but for a long experience in dolomite vagaries, have made us doubt our eyes. In the foreground a romantic waterfall, framed amongst woods of birch, beech, ash, and pine, dashed over the rocks. We could not but feel the contrast between such mountain scenery, where Nature seems to revel in the indulgence of her most poetical mood, and the dull formality of much we had lately been living amongst in eastern Switzerland. To me the Upper Engadine, with its long perspective of brown barren mountains leading to an ignoble termination, suggests irresistibly the last Haussman boulevard. Yet while the choicest spots of the Italian Tyrol remain deserted, fashion crowds the bleak shores of St. Moritz, and finds a charm even in the swamps of Samaden.

On a knoll above the waterfall stands a group of châlets. We were attacked in passing them by a gigantic dog, armed with a collar bristling with iron spikes. But for our ice-axes our expedition might have been brought to an untimely end. As it was, we stole a flank march on the foe, while Henri occupied his attention with a blow on the nose which indisposed him to follow up our retreat. The timber-slide we had lately followed comes down from the furthest corner of the recess at the back of Monte Spinale, whence an easy pass leads into the Val Teresenga, a lateral glen of Val di Sole, parallel to Val Selva.

Under the châlets a bridge crosses the stream, and a path mounts steeply the opposite hillside. We, by keeping too long beside the water, missed the track. While forcing our way back to it over the slowly decaying trunks, and amongst the rich ferns and weeds, we were tempted for a moment to fancy ourselves in a wilder land. Alas! the woodcutter's axe is already busy on these slopes, and they will not long retain their robes of primeval forest.

The path regained, a well-marked zigzag led us to the broad crest of the ridge dividing Val Brenta from the Vallesinella. There is probably no spot in the neighbourhood – not even excepting Monte Spinale – which commands so general, and at the same time so picturesque, a view. On three sides the ground falls rapidly towards Val Nambino and its tributary glens. Full in front of us stood the defiant tower of the Cima Tosa, with the two Boccas on either side of it. We could trace every step of our ascent to the Bocca dei Camozzi, an expedition in some respects even more singular than the Bocca di Brenta, and one which will in time become well known to travellers. Beyond the valley rose the comparatively tame forms of the granite range. Nearest to us was my old conquest, the Presanella, the highest summit of the whole country; further south, the upper snows of the Lares and Lobbia glaciers spread in a great white curtain between the Carè Alto and Adamello. Behind Monte Spinale the circle of mountains was completed by the dolomites of Val Selva.

Our path forked on the crest, one branch descending to a châlet perched on a shelf immediately overlooking the green plain at the head of Val Brenta. From this alp a footpath of some kind leads down to the track of the Bocca – a fact to be borne in mind by future travellers who wish to see in a day as much as possible of the scenery of the dolomites without crossing the pass to Molveno. We followed an upper track, skirting the southern base of a group of rocky pinnacles, on the highest of which stands a withered pine-stem, perhaps planted there by some agile shepherd. Before long the path came to an end in a rocky hollow immediately at the base of the precipices of the Cima di Brenta. Their appearance, had we not learnt from afar something of their secrets, would have been sufficiently forbidding. Over the gap by which we were about to recross into the head of Vallesinella shot up an astonishing dolomite, a facsimile of a Rhine castle, with a tall slender turret, perhaps 300 feet high, at one corner. Once across the ridge, the climber turns his back on all green things, and enters on a stony desert. He is within range of the mountain batteries, and in a fair position to judge of the havoc caused when frost and heat are the gunners. Overhead tower sheer bastions of red rock; the ground at their base is strewn with fragments varying in size from a suburban villa to a lady's travelling-box. A dripping crag, with a scanty patch of turf beside it, offered all that was wanted for a halting-place. We were now overlooking the lower portion of the deep trench, filled higher up by glacier, which divides the Cima di Brenta from the rock-peaks to its north. Through it a pass, a worthy rival of the Bocca di Brenta, and leading like it to the Val delle Seghe, has been discovered by Mr. Tuckett.

A short distance above us was the glacier-covered breach by which we felt confident the fortress might be won. To reach the level of the ice we climbed under the base of an almost overhanging cliff, and then across a boulder-strewn shelf. Mounting the sides of the glacier by a ladder of steps kicked in the snow which still covered them, we quickly reached and left below precipices and pinnacles which a short time before had looked hopelessly near the sky. At the top of the steep ascent lay a miniature snow-plain, surrounded by steep broken crags. From its further end a sort of funnel fell through the cliffs overhanging the Bocca di Brenta.

The summits of the Cima di Brenta were at some distance to the left, and it seemed possible there might yet be difficulties in store for us. The steep faces of rock fronting the south offered good hold for feet and hands, and discarding the rope we took each of us his own path. In a quarter of an hour we came to a broader part of the mountain, and surmounted in succession two snowy cupolas. The second looked like the summit, but on reaching it we saw a still higher crest beyond. Between us and it was a gap, on the north side of which lies a glacier which soon curls steeply over and falls upon the larger ice-stream at the base of the mountain. A short scramble, down and up again, brought us to the real top – a ridge of shattered crag nearly level for some distance. From here our eyes should have feasted on a view of rare beauty over the rich valleys of the Trentino to the rival peaks of Cadore and Primiero, down upon the deep-lying waters of Lago di Garda, and northwards over the snowy ranges of Tyrol. But our ill-luck in distant views that season followed us to the last. Dark clouds, the forerunners of a thunder-storm, had already wrapped the distant mountain tops, and fleecy vapours choked up the valleys at our feet. Nothing was clear but our own peak and the Cima Tosa, the huge mass of which now scarcely overtopped us by the height of its final snow-cap. We waited long and patiently for some friendly breeze to lift even a corner of the white carpet which concealed from us all that lay at the base of the precipices on the Molveno side. We prayed in vain; the weather changed only for the worse, and we did not care to risk a meeting with the thunder-cloud.

The storm which broke on us during the descent prevented any attempt to vary the morning's route until we reached Val Nambino, when we turned off to the left, and hurried down to rejoin our companions at Pinzolo.

Val Selva, though the shortest, is not the only tolerably easy means of access from Campiglio to Val di Sole. To the left from the Ginevrie Pass a path branches off to the Passo delle Malghette, and leads in six hours to Pelizzano; to the right another track leads over at the back of Monte Spinale to the Flavona alp – a high pasturage at the head of Val Teresenga, one of the few valleys in the Alps six hours in length which have escaped the all-seeing eyes of the author of the 'Alpine Guide.'

The Passo di Grostè is sometimes ascended by visitors to Campiglio as the nearest spot whence it is possible to look eastward over the Trentino. The rocks fall away from the top towards the Flavona Alp in a series of advancing courses of massive masonry, like the sides of a Greek theatre. Without local guidance, it is easy for a solitary traveller to get into difficulty amidst the maze of low cliffs.

The upper châlet of the Flavona Alp stands in the middle of a broad sloping pasturage overlooked by the bold cliffs of Monte Fublan and connected on the further side by an easy shepherds' pass with Val Sporeggio. Another 'Bocca' lately brought to light leads under the cliffs of the Cima di Brenta to the Val delle Seghe and Molveno. We must now, however, follow the water, which carries us down into one of the strangest recesses of the Alps. Our guide will soon desert us. For the greater part of its length Val Teresenga has no stream and no channel for one to run in. Where by every precedent there should be a level trough, we find nothing but a confusion of high-piled mounds. Mountains have fallen and blocked up this glen with their ruins, and one's impulse, unscientific it may be, suggests an earthquake as the only adequate cause for so extraordinary a cataclysm.

The open alps lie high up on the sunny shoulders of the Sasso Rosso and Sasso Alto; the depths are clothed in dense forests rich with a rank undergrowth of ferns and flowers, and, still more welcome to dry-throated travellers, of wild fruit. One Saturday afternoon, when the woodcutters and their families who visit the glen in summer were on their way down to spend a holiday at their villages in Val di Non, we met at least 200 people, scarcely one of whom was without a basket filled with bilberries, strawberries and raspberries.

Suddenly a new colour shines through the branches, and we reach the shore of a large circular sheet of water hemmed in on every side by cliffs and woods. By such a solitary pool might old Saturn have sat,

Forest on forest hung about his head,Like cloud on cloud.

In the centre the water is dark blue as an Egyptian night; round the rim fallen pine-trunks are strewn in disorder along the bottom and dye the border of the lake the deepest red.

Below the lake smooth, wall-like cliffs threaten the valley, and huge rock-slips again bury the stream, giving by their rough unclothed surface an air of desolation to the landscape. When the water suddenly gushes out, a noble fountain, half its waters are at once seized and imprisoned afresh in stone channels, which are soon seen high up on opposite sides of the glen running boldly along the face of vertical cliffs to carry refreshment to the upper slopes of Val di Non.

The cart-road descends rapidly through a deep and narrow gorge which, after making a sharp angle, opens into the noble expanse of the great valley a mile below Tuenno, and three or four below Cles. The high-road would soon carry us down to the Adige and the railway-station of San Michele. But we have yet to see the Lago di Molveno and the back of the Brenta.

At the eastern base of the dolomitic chain, more than 7,000 feet below its crowning crags, lies a deep trough, bounded on the further side by the crest of Monte Gazza, which, descending in steep cliffs into the valley of the Adige, slopes more gently towards the west. A considerable portion of this depression, the waters of which are turned in opposite directions by a low bank traversing its centre, is filled by the Lago di Molveno, one of the largest of high Alpine lakes. A strong stream flowing from the Val delle Seghe is its principal feeder, and, strange to say, it has no visible outlet. The village of Molveno, situated at the head of the lake, is the natural head-quarters for the exploration of the neighbouring mountains. Its situation, at a height of 3,000 feet above the sea, and close to peaks of nearly 11,000 feet, is so attractive, that if reasonable accommodation were provided it would become a favourite halting-place for travellers. At present it is almost completely unknown.61

The tracks to Molveno most frequented by the country people are those from the gorge of the Rocchetta in Val di Non and from the valley of the Sarca, near the Baths of Comano. We shall choose the northern.

We had spent a day of continuous downpour in driving down the Val di Non, and it was already late afternoon when our dripping omnibus deposited us in front of the wayside inn which marked the turning-point of the path to Val di Spor and Molveno.

As we wound up the steep hill the last clouds blew over, and wide views opened on all sides over the rich gentle slopes of the Nonsberg, covered with white villages, whose wet walls and roofs glittered in the slanting sunshine. Before long Spor itself came into sight, lifted high on a healthy hillside and capped by a picturesque castle. The sound of its sonorous church bells followed us far on our way. Hereabouts we left the cart-road and followed a shorter track under the castle-crag and along the eastern hillside to the village of Cenedago. Hence a short ascent over meadows, gorgeous in June with tiger-lilies, leads to the watershed, and the path, passing a pine-girt pool, begins almost imperceptibly to descend before Andolo is reached and the road rejoined. Our way now followed the right bank of the Bior brook, through woods above whose tree-tops tall dolomite pinnacles shot up against the sky. The forest soon thickened, and, although the ground no longer rose in front, shut out all view in the direction of Molveno, until on a sudden a corner was turned, and at the end of a long dark-green vista,

Lo! the shining levels of the lake,

confined on one side by a steep brow, on the other by the bold buttresses of the Brenta group. Far away to the south, seen through a space of air still aglow and quivering with the late sunbeams, rose the rounded crests of the hills above Riva. Close at hand, to be reached by some well-made zigzags, lay Molveno village on the shore of its lake and beside a little bay of singular beauty, shut in between steep banks and spanned at its mouth by a wooden bridge. The whole picture recalled some imaginative landscape of a great painter rather than any other Alpine scene.

Looking up Val delle Seghe.

We would willingly have lingered before it. But the sun had already set, and it was necessary to seek food and shelter without delay.

We were led to an irregular open space, which, despite its fountain, did not venture to call itself a piazza, and into a low, broad, dark entry, where among a litter of carts and logs we sat down while the guides sought the people of the inn. They were already half asleep, and came down with bewildered looks to tell us that there was no food in the house, but fish – yes – in the lake. Had not our own supplies fortunately furnished supper we should have fared but poorly. Nor did the accommodation promise well. Orcus itself can scarcely have a blacker portal than that which yawned for us on our way to the upper floor. The walls were coated with layer upon layer of soot and smoke, each so thick that the only reasonable theory seemed to be that in some alteration of the premises the original chimney of the house had been turned into the staircase without any preliminary cleansing. The bedrooms upstairs proved better than such an approach had led us to expect. It was an illustration of the primitive and trustful manners of the place that my bed and the next were separated by a baby's cot, the tenant of which, thus abandoned to our tender mercies by its parents, wisely refrained from expressing any emotion, and was not even discovered until morning.

The access from Molveno into the heart of the Brenta chain is by the Val delle Seghe – the valley of the saw-mills, the torrent of which discharges itself through a considerable delta into the lake a quarter of a mile south of the village. This glen is narrow and shut in by magnificent smooth, red cliffs of great height shooting out of dense beech forests. After penetrating three or four miles due west, rising steeply all the time, it abruptly terminates in a basin enclosed by the wildest crags. The two streams which here meet fall from recesses lying north and south, and giving access respectively to the Bocca di Vallazza, a pass leading to the high pasturages at the head of Val Teresenga, and to the more famous Bocca di Brenta. Between the two a third pass, discovered by Mr. Tuckett, leads directly to Campiglio by the Vallesinella.

We left Molveno by starlight, and dawn had but just bared the sky when we turned up the rough hillside leading to the Bocca di Brenta. The track at first climbed so steeply through the dewy forest that we were often glad to catch at a branch or root to ease the strain. The pasturage above is the Malga dei Vitelli, and the calves and the boys who tend them can afford to dispense with zigzags. The mothers of the herd are in more luxurious quarters, chewing the sweet herbage of the Flavona Alp or wandering over the broad ridges of Monte Gazza.

On a sudden the tip of the rock opposite us glowed as if with ruddy flame; for a few seconds every pinnacle was of the same colour, then the whole sun reached them, and over the solemn greens and greys of the lower earth the mountain rampart flashed out gorgeous with light and colour. The red gold assumed at sunrise by rocks of this formation may be better realised by a glance at Turner's 'Agrippina landing with the Ashes of Germanicus' (No. 523 in the National Gallery), than by reading pages of description.

Nowhere does a climber's attempt appear more ambitious and hopeless than in a dolomite country. The broken crags serve as scales by which to measure distance and emphasise height. There is none of the encouraging but deceitful monotony of snow-slopes. Yet as, ourselves still untouched by the sun's rays, we steadily mounted our treadmill path, huge towers which half-an-hour before had seemed sky-piercing, sank beneath us and gave place to another tier rising far overhead. At last the battlements were reached and the snowy breach of the Bocca opened on the right. But the pass did not satisfy our ambition, and we told Nicolosi to lead us against the keep itself. Passing round a rocky corner, we found ourselves for the first time facing the huge mass of the Cima Tosa. Two fields of ice lying at different levels clothed its shoulders, over which rose a bold head of rock. Below and behind us lay a strange tableland pierced by a deep punchbowl, empty as if it had been recently drained in a witches' Sabbat. But its singularity did not long detain our eyes, for in the east, far as the eye could reach, shone range behind range of deep-toned mountains, and the memory wandered to past summers as we counted over again the noble roll of the Venetian Alps.

The Cima Tosa is everywhere cliff-girt, and it is difficult to decide where to attack it. The spot where we approached it did not look more tempting than others. But Nicolosi had the advantage of experience, whereby we gained confidence and lost excitement.

To avoid a burning sun, we lunched in the cave between the ice and rock. After a few yards' scrambling the foot of an absolute wall was reached. Its height may be estimated by the fact that our rope, sixty feet long, just sufficed to pull a man up the whole of it. It was therefore some ten feet less than the rope. But although practically perpendicular throughout, and at the top even considerably overhanging, so much so that in descending I tried in vain, sitting on the edge, to watch the progress of my predecessor, it was not dangerous or even difficult. Leave on any wall bricks projecting throughout and send a man to the top of it with a rope, it is no hard matter for any one of moderate activity and nerve to follow. No strain may be put on the rope round your waist, yet it is a sort of moral banister which places one completely at one's ease.

This crag scaled, the rest of the way, though steep, proved easy. The rope was left, and we scrambled as we liked up alternate rocks and snow-beds until the final snow-dome of the mountain was gained.

The view resembled in general character those from the Adamello summits, except that the neighbouring snow-fields hid the Swiss Alps, and in revenge the upper end of Lago di Garda lay, a blue polished sheet, beneath the broad back of Monte Baldo.

The neighbouring tower or buttress, so noble from the Val di Brenta, was now a stone's throw below us. Its top may some day be reached, but there is a gap to be crossed, and the Matterhorn has not more awful precipices. A long trough, filled with the snows which break off year by year from the mountain crest, falls 3,000 feet, at an almost uniform angle, on to the Val di Brenta side of the Bocca. A party of steady, patient men with ice-axes might mount or even descend it in safety, but it is a place where haste or carelessness would mean broken necks.

It is easy to return by the ordinary route to the corner whence the peak was first seen, and then traverse ledges to the top of the Bocca. The way from the pass to the plain beneath the great tower lies along the bottom of a trough, snow-filled and steep above, then more level and grassy. The last descent is made by a stony zigzag on the right-hand side of the cleft. Run down it as swiftly as you may, and then fling yourself on your back among the creeping pines and look up straight into the sky, where more than 4,000 feet overhead the vapours meet and part round the astounding rock-tower which shoots up solitary and unsupported until its top is lost in the sky. Nowhere in the Alps will you gain so strong an impression of sheer height.