| Ski the Ortler Traverse |
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Page 4 of 5
“What’s the difference between a guide and a large pizza?” “What?” “A large pizza will feed a family of four.” “How is a mountain guide like a tile floor?” “If you lay it right the first time, you can walk all over it forever.” Goldie and Ward smile patiently. They’ve heard it all before. As we ski uphill, one peak stalks us in the northwest: 12,635-foot Il Gran Zebrù, looking about as welcoming as a fang. Goldie says he’d like the group to ski it from the summit this week. But now the scenic valley clouds rouse themselves to give chase. 
The group thaws out in natural springs at the Bagni Vecchi, in Bormio, a welcome antidote to the Ortlers’ unruly spring conditions.
Staggering forward, we understand Monelli’s sense of suffocation. Finally, a smudge appears. Is it a rock outcrop? A glacial moraine? No, it’s the Rifugio Casati, materializing at 10,676 feet like God’s mercy, with cappuccino. We pile inside. After a warm-up and some caffeine, we eventually head back out. Feeling for the valley bottom as if we’re blind, we drift on skis for miles down the gentle seam of the Valle di Cedèc, the fog lifting just enough to reveal a treeless before-time land, where lizard-tail moraines of past glaciers curl off the mountainsides. Then we climb into another valley dotted with skeletal larches. The snow falls harder, and wet. It clings to shoulders, clumps to the base of climbing skins, as if bricks have been lashed to feet. And just as things again seem near their most dispiriting, the outstretched hand of another stone hut appears, its stoutness softened by jovial red shutters, the tricolori of the Italian flag waving a desultory welcome out front: the Rifugio Cesare Branca. Sitting on a bluff at 8,179 feet near the base of the Forni icefield, the 100-bed Branca hut is everything last night’s hut was, and then some. Smaller rooms, but a bigger bar that offers everything from soft-serve ice cream to Red Bull. And though we’ve now crossed over to an Italian valley, Branca’s got gemütlichkeit, in spades: Outside, a bent old man in an Alpine hat shovels snow from the deck. Inside, above the long pine benches where skiers drink beer, the walls are decorated with early crampons and ice axes, and a photo of Pope Pius XI, Il Papa Alpinista. On top of that, the Branca hut is rumored to be home to the best hut food around. “It’s my favorite hut in the Alps,” Goldie confides that afternoon. No wonder he’s got the group booked here for three nights. That evening, between heapings of pasta and the second and third bottles of another solid Sudtirol red, old stories get dusted off for fresh laughs. There was the summer when the six friends converged on Chamonix, where the apartment they rented was supposed to sleep 11. “Maybe they meant not all at one time,” Johnston deadpans. “We were able to squeeze four.” They remember how Goldie got locked in the flat’s broom closet of a toilet, and how they slid him a butter knife under the door as the panic rose in their fearless leader. Goldie smiles wanly. He has endured this, too, before. The table talk is the talk of old friends. They joke about past adventures, of both the epic and disastrous varieties. They talk about climbing partners they’ve known and still know. They discuss skis and places to ski. And if the conversation isn’t exactly of Important Things, well, that misses the point. What’s important for all of them is just being here, together, wrapped in the amniotic warmth of good friendship, with a glass in hand that hasn’t run dry and snow falling outside the windows. By ten o’clock, the lights behind the bar dim, but no one is around to notice. By ones and twos, they’ve already drifted upstairs to climb under the wool blankets beneath the roofline’s heavy beams and read, before sinking backward into exhaustion’s quicksand. |
An electric thrill thrums through the group the next morning. A postcard for an Alpine holiday has replaced last night’s low clouds: Bleached glaciers float on a batten of sunlit valley clouds; white peaks are clothespinned to a Windex sky. It’s the kind of “Greetings from Italy!” view everyone has come for—and the forecast says it’s fleeting, so everybody gets moving. Goldie kicks and glides up the long, mellow ramp of the Cevedale Glacier, beneath its namesake 12,326-foot peak. Johnston is right behind him, as usual. He was quiet at the table last night, but he never seems as comfortable and garrulous as when he is moving strongly and steadily in the mountains.
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