Alpine...err..excursion

I finally got to see some mountains. Being on top of the Duomo in Milan, you can see all the way to the Alps and as far as Mont Blanc on a very clear day, so you can imagine that being a boy born and raised on Long Island, any form of topography is the subject of great… fascination for me.

That all being said, Saturday we did a six hour hike in the Alps. It wasn’t supposed to be nearly as long or as hard as it ended up, but checking the website which was both in Italian and probably horribly out of date, we (Elena, her boyfriend Arnaud and I) selected a trail near a town called Lecco in the Italian Alps very close to the border with Switzerland for a leisurely hike. The trail started in this little town called Crebbio that we reached by taking a series of switch backs and roads that would’ve been the end of my Expedition through a small medieval town nestled above Lake Como. I was in heaven. All the little stone buildings built into a seemingly unforgiving hillside, old men with three dogs and hiking sticks everywhere… these were the Italian Alps! This was Italy!

The directions (which I had to copy from the computer because it was the late site open before the internet here crashed) were sketchy at best. We were, amongst other things, supposed to pass through a chestnut tree grove, a fountain (just indicated as a fountain), cross a little stream called Zerbo and a cross carved into the rock on a trail #5 which had essentially no sign. Just getting to the trail was problematic enough and, showing our directions to a local, I was met with a curious glare that really read as “you freaking people from the city, you think you’re actually gonna do this?” He was nice anyway and pointed us in the direction (keep going right).

The chestnuts were nowhere to be found on the trail, but somehow we ended up following a trail maker that seemed right. We made it to a fountain though and continued going right. Somehow but a series of chance decisions and of course a little divine intervention, our decisions put us on the right trail which was consequently, marked by the same marker we had chosen by chance. Talk about fate (ok it’s a little corny, but come on!)

The trail, which I imagine eventually let to the peak of a huge mountain started at a really... leisurely slope. Just as we finished commenting on how we would never make it to the top at this pace, we were met with, which would turn out to be about three quarters of our climb, with a trail at a slope at about 75 degrees. If you remember the winter we had in North America before… well now, you know that it felt more like spring. Somehow, the lack of winter seems to be chasing me wherever I go (even though I’ve probably expressed about a million times how much I love snow). Needless to say, nearly 2 seconds into the hike we were taking off layer after layer.

After about three hours of what seemed to be rock climbing more than hiking, I began to notice something strange. The trails were becoming more like roads….with people… and motorcycles. Somehow, the trail we had taken, led us to a community nestled in one of the lower summits of this big mountain. All this to say that our huge Alpine adventure up steep slopes and through treacherous and unforgiving forests brought us right back in the middle of civilization…at a higher altitude.

I loved it. You can’t imagine how beautiful it really was and granted, although we were sweating a lot, tired and sore at the end it was really worth it. The metaphors and life lessons of all this, the hike that leads you back to the middle of civilization, the right trailmarkers we followed by chance, the leaps of faith, the trials and tribulations that lead to unbelieveable beauty...I leave you to decide...but it was truly a journey for the books.

The photos (and where I'll be posting future ones) are here:
http://picasaweb.google.it/matthew.arancio/