”Closer, God, to Thee”, I mumble to myself through gritted teeth. It’s the song the orchestra played as the Titanic went down, and I share their sentiment – and yet I couldn’t be further from their ordeal. Nor is it the Christian God I have in mind, when now I stand to meet my maker, but Thor, or Jupiter, gods of thunder. 

I’m in the Dolomites, the UNESCO-protected Italian-Austrian outlier of the alps, and it’s the first of four days of hiking. Only now I’m beginning to wonder if it will be my last. And yet it started out so well.

I arrived in Val Gardena last night and took the funicular first thing in the morning. True, there had been an almighty thunder storm in the night, but now the skies were blue, the air imbued with that particular cool freshness that follows a summer rain. And to start with the hike was as bucolic as can be: through the pine forests lining the sides of the garden valley, where intensely pink alpine roses covered the forest floor, to pastures with an astonishingly rich flora, where mountain cows of the Milka variety grazed happily, quite unconcerned with the lone wanderer in their midst. 

My plan was to hike la Curona de Gherdëina – the crown of Gardena, a circular route taking me all around the valley in question, staying at different rifugios, mountain huts, along the way.

The first rifugio I came upon was a working farm, in a setting so picture perfect that you’d expect a von Trapp to come dancing past at any moment. The meadows were all aflower, an old woman was churning butter in the morning sun, and a smiling serving girl got me my Aplfelshorle – apple juice and sparkling water. It was wonderful. To the right loomed one of the sharp, jagged mountain ridges that are emblematic to the Dolomites, like the broken teeth of some buried giant with a serious dentist aversion, but I wasn’t overly concerned, since I felt sure the path would skirt around it. How wrong I was!

As I set out again it became alarmingly clear that the path wasn’t going to swerve – instead it went straight up towards the escarpment and then continued in the shape of a via ferrata (literally “iron road”), with crampons and steel wires hammered into the rockface for the intrepid hiker/climber to hang on to. Like a very small and inefficient dental floss I struggled onwards and upwards between the serrated teeth, acutely aware that mistakes were not an option, only to suddenly reach the crest, and the astonishing view of a gently sloping valley filled with restaurants and scores of elderly day-trippers. 

I felt quite annoyed at this sight: having worked so hard, surely I deserved better than to have groups of selfie-taking pensioners blocking my path? (It turned out that this was the result of a Seilbahn nearby, making for easy access to all and sundry.) I pressed on, and soon entered another valley, this one gorgeously empty apart from a dry river bed made up of the white sandstone that abounds here. It was like having a pristine, meandering road to myself, leading into the interior and away from the unwashed masses. I was overjoyed. 

Alas, the only way out of a valley if you move away from its mouth is by climbing, and this is where my troubles began. By now it was close to 30 degrees in the shade – and no shade – and my legs were fair shaking after four hours of hard hiking when the climb up the escarpment began in earnest. Looking behind me I was also aware that dark clouds were beginning to form, so I didn’t want to linger, even though my muscles were protesting loudly.

Sweaty beyond belief I made my way higher and higher, over gravel of the kind I learnt to loathe in France, past the first patches of perma-snow – somewhat surprisingly a pretty pink colour, which is apparently caused by bacteria. I might have been a pretty pink colour by this stage as well for all I know, climbing up sheer rock walls in the midday sun. When I finally reached the crest high above it was to find an illustration from Tolkien immediately in front of me: the darkest, most evil-looking clouds I’ve ever seen were hanging around the next broken-toothed ridge, itself an ominous sight. All that was missing was a fiery eye in the sky, and I would have been staring at the gates of Mordor. 

As it was, the very real danger was that the thunder clouds would catch up with me and I would find myself stuck on this ridge. Quite apart from the downpour rendering the sheer rock dangerously slippery to traverse, the combination of me swinging on iron crampons near the summit and lightning from on high was one I didn’t particularly care to contemplate. I also knew that I had precious little to protect myself in the event of a real downpour – only a very light rain jacket and an emergency blanket – so I didn’t fancy my chances much if I had to try to bivouac, but what choice did I have? 

Only one. On shaky legs – exhaustion and fear and adrenaline being a potent brew – I half walked, half ran the last three quarters of an hour to the refugio where I was to spend the night, caught up in the cold front that precedes proper storms, shorts and tshirt soaked through with icy sweat, but I made it. 

Not half an hour after I dash through the door to the refugio, the world outside was lost to clouds and lightning and torrential rain, but by that time I was bedded down in my bunk, utterly exhausted and trying to regain some warmth, dry and pleased with having outrun Jupiter. 

The rest of the day was spent acclimatising to life in a refugio; the dormitories have a dozen bunk beds each, piled three high, with the commotion this brings. Showers are four euros and five minutes each, and only available after six, dinner is served between seven and eight. Thankfully, in this regimented microcosm I’m seated with a lovely New York couple and an equally charming English ditto for dinner, which makes it a very pleasant affair, but I am spent and back in bed by nine. 

Sleep comes hard, however, as I mull over the possibility that I have bitten off more than I can chew. The second day promises even more kilometres and height difference – will I really manage that, with my body already one big, dull ache, and more thunder storms a distinct possibility?