I came to the mountains without much of a plan. I was on my own, so could do exactly as I wanted. All I knew was that I yearned for beauty, hiking, and solace. The alps usually deliver, and the Dolomites (roughly the Italian part of the mountain range) are particularly well known for their beauty, so I was fairly certain I’d get the first two.

Solace might be a different story, as for me it’s a part of the world I associate with the end of my marriage, so I was prepared for a few bad memories to resurface. What I hadn’t realized was just how commonplace bad memories are in the region. It was the scene of intense fighting during the Great War, when Austro-Hungarians and Italians wrestled over dominion of the Südtyrol region in valleys and on mountains all over the Dolomites. The former lost to the latter, and Südtyrol passed into Italian hands, but not before battle upon battle had been fought here, with intense suffering as a result.

Even now the scars are there, and the language you use will greatly affect the reaction you get, depending on the mother tongue of your conversation partner. As a local woman in her seventies confided to me (in German): the older generation doesn’t want to learn Italian, because of what happened.

She said it as if it (the first world war) had happened only last year, not over a century ago, but then the very land here still bears the marks to remind people. A case in point: the victorious Italians set about changing all the place names, but the old names still linger, in minds and on maps. And so it is that I set out from Dreizinnenblick/Vista Panoramico Tre Cime to hike up a long, picturesque valley to what is arguably the most recognizable of all features in the alps: Drei Zinnen, or Tre Cime, a constellation of three enormous rocks, that are the poster children of the Dolomites. To me they don’t look like crenellations (German) or chimneys (Italian) so much as three crooked old grave stones, leaning drunkenly on one another.

In a way they are, too, because many a man has perished in their shadows, either trying to climb one of the various routes up the rocks themselves, or in the aforementioned pitched fights. I felt as if I were about to join the ranks of the victims; my heart rate oscillated somewhere between ER and morgue when I finally made it up to the rifugio that sits across from the three giants. I was quite surprised therefore when I saw a lot of people strolling about up there – all the more so because I had set out early, and had hardly seen a single human all the way up the valley. It turns out that on the other side of the Big Three a paved road takes you all the up to the foot of the rocks, and so day trippers come up by coach or car and have a wee bit of a walk around. To me – fainting and damn near going into cardiac arrest – it felt like they were cheating: that’s not how you commune with the mountains!

Thankfully, not many of those visitors elected to stay the night, which was a stroke of luck for me, as even as it was I only just managed to get one of the very last bunk beds in the rifugio/Hütte (although late in the season, reservations (and cash!) are of the essence, it seems.). After six hours’ hiking, 21km and 2,000 vertical meters, I ate everything in sight, and then promptly fell asleep around eight, still wearing my clothes.

The next day I set out earlier still, traversing the sella (saddle, i.e. mountain pass) that sits behind Rifugio Lavaredo in order to descend back down to Dobbiaco via Val Campi di Dentro. Up there was where I first encountered the remnants of real fortifications. I had seen a couple of man-made caves the day before, but here I stumbled upon a fortress hewn out of the bare rock – trenches, underground storage space, machine gun nests, walls, and perhaps most poignantly of all, a lonely little cairn. It was nought but a small pile of rocks with a cross made from a couple of sticks bound by rusty barbed wire, sitting across from the Tre Cime as a forelorn monument over some long gone nameless poor bastard who died here. It seemed so futile, somehow, to lay down your life in order to prevent someone you don’t know from crossing an imaginary line drawn on a map, only to be forgotten by all, a lonely rock pile being the only memorial to your anonymous existence. Was he Italian or Austro-Hungarian? No way of knowing.

I mentioned where I was to a friend, and it turned out that her great grandfather had been a Kaiserjäger, a member of an elite company who fought in these very parts. Even if you survived, how could such an experience not scar a man for life? And who can tell what this meant for future generations? I find it fascinating and depressing in equal measure. And so I was in a pensive mood as I passed across the pass, past several similar gunners’ nests, where once your efforts for climbing this far would have been rewarded by having your neighbours lying in wait to shoot you in the face. Today however, the only blood on the ground was Alpen-Bärenträube (lit. Alpine Bear grapes), a low growing and intensely red plant that brought a bit of colour to the rockiest stretches.

Then, as I descended further down into the valley, the trees grew higher, the undergrowth more verdant, and I followed a dainty brook all the way to the valley floor. In the middle of the forest I came upon the spooky old ruin of a former spa hotel, where once the upper echelons of society came to ”take the waters”. This they did from the five springs in the vicinity that (in spite of being very close together) were once – according to helpful signs – thought to cure a variety of vastly different ailments. I choose to fill my CamelBak with natural mineral water from two of them, the combination of which may well cure me of liver diseases, ulcers, chronic (!) gastritis, skin ailments and a variety of gynecological disorders, if the signs were to be believed. Pas mal! Thus fortified, I made it back to “my” hotel, where I again ate like a champ, then passed out like a chump.

Day 3 the weather had taken a turn for the worse. Where previously there had been clear blue skies, there were now ominous-looking clouds, but as the forecast said there would be very little rain, if any, and I had my magic potion from the day before to ward off most ailments, I still set off, this time going from Cimebanche/Im Gemärk up another valley to an area optimistically called Prato Piazza (Flat Space). From there it was onwards and upwards, skirting a massive peak coloured red by iron oxide, called Croda Rossa (Red Cross), or “the bleeding heart of the Dolomites”. I noted with surprise and great satisfaction that my own heart was neither bleeding nor fluttering like a kolibri any more. The trail was long and hard though, the massif looking like a giant dragon lying on top of the mountain, so it was with some trepidation I continued. The dragon didn’t wake, but the path did lead past areas of massive rockfall, where such immense quantities of stones had fallen from the heights as to create whole fields of red boulders (I later learned that the rockfalls can be sufficiently powerful to register as earth quakes!). Moving across one of those and hearing rocks starting to bounce down from high above you in the clouds is an experience that will make you feel very small and vulnerable, for sure.

The same goes for passages where you turn a corner to find that the path takes you on the outside of sheer cliffs, where a chain bolted into the rock is the only thing to hold on to, and one misstep means certain death. The payoff is of course the immense vistas and god-like viewpoints you experience far away above the valleys, but I’m weirdly glad I was alone – for the simple reason that I’m not sure I could bear to watch someone I care for scrambling across those abysses. I remember my father forever calling us back from precipices when we were in the alps when I was a kid – I understand him now.

Eventually I make it back down again, all the way to “the most beautiful lake in the alps”, Lago di Braies, which is truly gorgeous, but by this point the rain was hanging in the air, I’d been out for seven hours, I was exhausted, and my annoyance at the sightseeing day trippers was such that I just got on the first bus and went back “home”.

(Incidentally, the people of “my” hotel must think me mad, because I check out every morning and come back (nearly) every evening; it’s because my guidebook (Walking the Dolomites) keeps insisting that my itineraries are 2-3 day affairs, which means I’m carrying everything I need for a week on my back wherever I go. In spite of this I manage to cover enough ground to be back down again every evening except the first one, hence my strange behaviour. Had I known I could have left 85% of my kit in the hotel, which would have saved me quite a few calories…)

The next day it is pouring down. The thing is, when it’s raining in the mountains you are literally in the clouds, so there is little chance it will let up. I grind my teeth and put on all my rain kit, and make my way to the start of a trail up to something called Val de Fanes (the Valley of the Fanes people – local fairy folk). Unfortunately, my local map doesn’t cover this area, and the guidebook is quite sketchy, so I’m in terra incognita. There are two sights on the way up into the land of the faeries that I know I want to see, however: Cascate di Fanes, the highest waterfall in the Dolomites, and Ponte Ulto (Ladin for High Bridge), crossing a chasm of similar magnitude to that of the waterfall – 70 meters. I hiked up to the edge of the canyon to see the waterfall crashing down on the other side. I then made it down to the bottom only to realize that the path back up again on the other side was a via ferrata, which really requires proper climbing gear. I made an attempt of it, but as it was pouring with rain and everything was slick and slippery I reluctantly decided I had no choice but to turn around.

So back down the canyon I went, and then all the way back up again on the other side, back to the same waterfall, reached by another via ferrata (this one slightly less murderous, but still intimidating in the rain). So I saw the waterfall every which way you could, and the bridge as well (less impressive), but after the lengthy detour I had already used up about half the day, and since I didn’t know how far it was to the Valley of the Fairies, I eventually gave up. I had hiked for hours in the rain through the sodden pine forest, ever upwards, and in spite of my rain gear I was soaked through (condensation being just as efficient as actual precipitation in that regard), my muscles were stiff and cold, and I didn’t want to continue into the unknown. I was done.

By the time I made it back to the valley it’s late afternoon, and the hotel owner informs me that they haven’t turned on the heating yet, so there is no way to dry my clothes. It’s the mountain gods’ way of telling me this is it. The next morning I get on a train and leave the mountains behind. I make it to Milan and spend the next 36 hours soaking up the atmosphere and madness of the Milano Fashion Week instead – as contrasts go it couldn’t be any further from the solitude, sorrows and solace of the mountains.