Day three sees me waking early once more, as strong winds howl across the plateau and through the rifugio. It’s five thirty, and I can’t bring myself to leave the warmth of my sleeping bag, so spend an hour more sacrificing at the altar of Morpheus, but by seven I’m ready to leave, setting off before anyone else. 

I’m retracing my steps across the moonscape to descend the mountains of the Ladin at the opposite end I got up yesterday. My main concern today is the possibility that I might have to climb down another via ferrata – not something that I relish – but I needn’t have worried, the path down – the Via Alta di Dolomiti – is quite navigable (Don’t get me wrong: put one foot wrong and it might still kill you, but in an absent-minded way, not with the murderous intent of yesterday’s walls), and as the name indicates, has been in use for a long time – we’re in the vicinity of the place where Ötzi, the Stone Age murder victim, was found, after all. I wonder what Palaeolithic deities he prayed to, if any, as he lay dying here. 

Shaking off these morbid thoughts I get my head out of he clouds (quite literally) and follow ever-growing streams of meltwater down the mountain, until – two hours after I set out – I’m down below the tree line once more. I have second breakfast by a wonderful waterfall, and an even better encounter with an inquisitive marmot (all the others I’ve seen until now have disappeared before I was anywhere near). I stop in my tracks so as not to scare her off, and when I bring out my musli-bars and gently offer her a morsel she decides I am her new best friend, completely losing any inhibition. I end up hand-feeding her, and when she had eaten a whole square (some 400 calories worth) she preceded to lick my fingers. It was as if the goddess Ladinia herself had taken marmot shape to welcome me down off the mountain (it may just have been the peanut butter too, of course) and it was a moment of utter joy. 

The morning holds one more surprise for me: heavily pregnant with the snow and hail of the last couple of days, the stream that I have been following has swollen well beyond its normal size – something which becomes apparent when I arrive at a ford, where the usual crossing is now a foot deep, two meters wide and, above all, cascading down with full force. Setting foot in the water would be impossible – the speed and power of the water would pull me off my feet immediately, dragging me down with it as it roars valleywards in leaps and bounds. I search up and down the white water and finally decide upon a spot where, balancing on a rock on my side, I can hopefully reach the opposite shore, all wet but solid-looking rocks. Lunging forward I land hard on the other side, with less than an inch to spare from the cauldron seething behind me.  

After that, at least, I’m in familiar territory – the forest looks uncannily like that of Tiveden, the Swedish nature park I hiked last year, if Tiveden had been tilted at a forty-five degree angle! So pleased with this morning’s decent am I, that when I come to a crossroads I think nothing of it, and continue downwards towards the valley floor.  Alas, only too late do I remember that the next point on my itinerary is Passo Sella, and a pass in this part of the world is the point where it’s possible to get from one valley to the next – in other words, high up. So back up I go, suddenly forced to share a road with stinking, motorised vehicles and bike riders – not nice at all after two days of nothing but the odd hiker. 

This involuntary detour has meant that I have five, six kilometres more notched up than I should, so when I arrive at Sellalungo – another of these serrated mountain ranges that penetrate the landscape like the crest of a subterranean plesiosaur – and there is a funicular on offer, I only debate briefly with myself before getting a one-way ticket to the top. It’s a rickety construction, taking one or two passengers per ride, and you’re required to leap into what looks uncannily like a plastic wardrobe and hope that the assistant manages to close the door behind you, but up I go, and in ten minutes I have reached the top. And so I’m back where I started this morning, descending yet another gravel-strewn ravine, tap dancing over the pebble fields to finally arrive at today’s rifugio, perilously perched on the slope, a full hour and a half before the habitual deluge begins. 

I had contemplated walking further today, but I’m glad I didn’t, as this afternoon’s outbreak was even fiercer than normal: hail the size of marbles drum down on the terrace where I had Kaiserschmarren for lunch, a hundred rivulets run straight under the house – built as it is on pollards to keep it from sliding into the next valley – and thunder and lightning echo and ricochet between the peaks. Had I gone further I would have been playing a very unequal game of chicken with these powers, racing towards the next refugio much like the first day – much better then to be seated inside, resting my weary body, even if it means spending half the day doing nothing much at all. 

From two in the afternoon until I go to bed at ten, it pours down, then there’s hail, thunder, more rain, and on it goes, until it feels as if we might cast off from the pollards and sail away. And with that weird notion I fall asleep.