Good night of sleep last night -- less noisy and more comfortable temperature. Breakfast: hot coffee with hot milk (yay) and then the usual bread, cheese, ham, jam, and honey (good, but they are starting to wear out their welcome). It filled in the necessary gaps, however, and before too long we were packed and ready to hit the trail by around 7:40. Very nice weather -- cool but sunny, no trace of rain.
We retraced our steps from the previous day's hike for a kilometer or two then took a right turn that took us higher up the slope right up to the edge of the high cliffs that form the edge of the valley, well above treeline. We then started hiking east, covering a path that runs parallel to the one were were on yesterday but is a few hundred meters higher up (lower trail is not even visible for most of the way, interestingly).
If you squint you can see Ethan and Lydia way up ahead on the trail (their usual position relative to mom and dad):
There were a couple of dicy bits where the trail had been washed out, but for the most part it was an ok path.
Here we are looking down on the previous trail (you can just make out the bit with the tunnel that we went through):
Descending towards Col De Bois:
Washed out trail:
The gang:
Making our turn to the north:
The trail eventually led us up to Col de Bois, a lovely but very barren and rocky pass, where we crossed over a saddle and started heading down a valley to the north. I stopped to take a look at some ruins near the top (hard to tell what vintage, but I assume they were WW-I era like most of the rest). We saw some more along the way down the trail into the valley.
A rather nasty and damp cave next to this ruin:
The fork:
One ruin was especially odd: a cave/tunnel/passage dug into a large boulder with a sort of a window looking out from the top. I climbed up and into the tunnel to see what it looked like from the inside.
View from the inside:
A marmot along the way. They always manage to look very suspicious, as if you caught them doing something illegal:
From there it was a steady downhill until were had reached a fair way into the valley, at which point the trail merged with the river plain (covered with rocks and sand) and became much more indistinct (you would go for quite a ways without seeing any markers or anything to indicate that people had been walking there). We had to hunt around a few times to pick up the right way to go, and at one point had to even double back a bit.
View to the north:
On the riverbed (no sign of the trail in sight):
Lunch at around 11:30 under a large boulder perched on the edge of the trail. Sandwiches (ham and cheese) were still pretty asic but a bit more palatable than the Rif. Croda Da Lago ones. All of us are starting to fantasize about meals involving huge bowls of broccoli, spinach, and other green vegetables...
Second half of the hike was a bit less interesting-- just more steady downhill as the valley wound its way downwards (with a couple of turns) as the river beside us grew larger and larger. The water was a lovely color-- a sort of very pale robin's egg blue/gray, very nice. We eventually wrapped up the hike at around 2pm (six hours) at which point we were all pretty sick of walking (19km total or thereabouts). We called the designated number and were picked up by a taxi from Cortina, which took us to the bus station without incident.
On the bus back to Corvara:
We had hoped to catch an earlier bus, but it turned out that the only two departures were 2pm and 5pm, so we had to wait around a bit. We spent time consuming gelato, walking around Cortina (which has a nice pedestrian shopping district) and enjoying being on our rear ends instead of on our feet.
Total stats for the hike -- around 19 kilometers, 830 meters ascent and a whopping 1485 meters descent. Long day.
Alas, I managed to leave my hat on the bus -- arg. I had put it up on the high luggage rack, then walked right off the bus without it, grump. Oh well. I also discovered later that I had left one of my pairs of glasses in the hut on the first night; I am leaving bits behind at an unusually high rate this time around.
We eventually made it back to Pension Angelo (also a Collett's outfit, but this one more like a hotel, where they provide all the meals) around 6:30pm; lots of scrambling around to try to locate the bags that we had left behind, get unpacked, and of course (the critical bit) figure out the hotel wifi for the kids. The latter proved to be almost unusable, alas, so there was some grumbling and many attempts to figure out how to improve the network speed.
Group dinner with a bunch of the other folks at the Pension, all of whom turned out to be from the UK. Because of the table configurations we had to split up -- Amy and the kids were at one table and I wound up as a single at another table, hmm. I did have an enjoyable conversation with a couple from London, however.
