When dawn comes I feel surprisingly ok. As yesterday showed, the midday heat and the afternoon gewitter are my main enemies, so I set out at seven, having elected to skip breakfast. My homemade power bars will do me fine. Water is a concern, however, as my trusty camelbak bladder started leaking yesterday, which has left me with nothing but my LifeStraw, all 0.6 litre’s worth. In 30 degree heat that is Not Good. I pick up a discarded water bottle and fill it at the well, and then I’m off. 

The first two hours are relatively easy, with only one longish climb, through a landscape not unlike what I imagine Iceland to be – grass and rocks, and the odd flock of sheep looking balefully at me as I pass them by. I skirt the side of one crest, and come out on the side of Val Gardena at its highest point, where I have a break (and a second power bar breakfast) overlooking a bergbahn far below, and the Sella mountain massif on the other side, the walls rising vertically in the air to make it look like an impregnable skyscraper fortress more than anything. It’s a daunting sight, and all the more so since that’s where I’m headed. 

I descend through more marvellous meadows, cross the valley and head upwards again on Via 666. The name conjures up another unpleasant deity, but it seems my fears are unfounded, as the path runs alongside the imposing walls. Until suddenly it doesn’t. Instead it rises upwards, ever upwards through a ravine, at an impossible angle, the gravel wet and yielding, slippery and treacherous. That goes on for an eternity, and then, after having crossed the first snow field of the day, it becomes another Via ferrata, only this one has the added bonus of going up through a waterfall, with glacial water sputtering down on the climber, hands going numb in the process. It’s gruelling, and truly the devil’s own, but after a three hundred metre climb my efforts are rewarded, much like yesterday, by the sudden appearance of a plateau. This one is much higher up than yesterday’s green and pleasant land, however – here there is nothing but rock and more rock. Nothing but a timely refugio, that is, right by a sky-coloured lake of mountain water, with the best goulash soup I’ve ever tasted. 

It’s a wonderful respite, but of course it cannot last, as I’m only half way through today’s itinerary. Ever upwards I trundle. More climbing. The hail storms of the two previous nights have left massive quantities of granular snow on the ground. Going up the north face of the mountain the snow is slushy but solid enough to take a hiker’s weight most of the time (the tracks of other hikers show only too clearly when this hasn’t been the case), but it’s still hard going, and once I reach the summit the south side isn’t much better, because here the sun has gone to work, turning the whole mountain into one big waterfall, so walking becomes a very wet affair. On top of that, the god of thunder has been busy again, and all around me are darkly pregnant clouds. I make haste, body surprisingly responsive, stopping only to talk a South Korean woman out of going down the way I’ve just ascended, and make it to today’s Rifugio after six hours of solid hiking, and a full forty-five minutes before Jove unleashes his fury once more. 

This refugio is considerably more primitive than the previous one – there are no showers, only wash basins with icy water, and toilets are mere holes in the floor; it seems unnecessarily cruel to force people to squat after the ordeal of getting here, but on the other hand I feel a lot better today, in spite of my trials and tribulations, and sit quite happily in the common room with a beer and chocolate cake (hunger makes one considerably less choosy about what goes together), reading my book, waiting for dinner, and then wolfing it down the moment it arrives. Three courses later and I’m off to bed, happily surprised to be alive and well.