The True Summit

As you read these words you know what my story here is called, but as I start writing this, I myself do not know what the title will be and I don’t even know, with any clarity at all, just what it is that I want to say. So I start out writing the way we start out in life - hopeful, energised, unknowing of the end until I get there.

Surely the best journeys are all this way?

Like this day almost two years ago now when I climbed to the summit of Cima Pisciadù and felt the stone hold me up into that cold wind as an offering - to the clouds, to the sky, to the sun.

And for that moment all that something, and all that nothing

seemed almost everything I could ever desire,

with just one thing missing.

The day had started in the village of Funtanacia, down in Val Badia, nestled deep in the Italian Dolomites. We had arrived two days before as just another stop on a long, unplanned, meandering journey. We were heading back North, and through the Dolomites on a whim, because I love mountains, and we stopped at Funtanacia because when we saw it the name simply delighted us. What better reason could there be?

Funtanacia

Val Badia is all about the pale stone of the mountains, crowded on every side as they soak up the sunlight in the dawn, and the mountains are all about the valley - that green furrow filled and overflowing with life. It is as if each implies the other - opposites creating a whole, and after a day of exploring the valley my heart simply yearned for the hills, desirous of that completion, so my wonderful woman - who knows me deeply - said “Go climb something!”

Well I spent that evening doing the kind of quick online research of which terrible errors in adventure are all too often made, then at dawn I set off, as well equipped as I could be under the circumstances. Decent boots - yes. A comfortable backpack. Two warm(ish) thermal layers. One rain jacket - too small. A bit of food for energy and two litres of water.

My map was a screen shot on my phone taken from an online route guide, but the weather forecast was good and I knew there would be other people on the trail.

Cima Pisciadù was the peak I had chosen - seen on the right in the photo below left - and soon after dawn I was at the base, below the Passo Gardena, looking up….

There’s something about going up; you love it or you hate it or sometimes it’s both at once but there can be no middle ground, and this was a very big up.

Steep scree slopes funnelling down into this tight cleft - a boulder bowling alley.

I was acutely aware that every rock down here had come from up there, and no doubt quite rapidly, but there is a marvellously simple mathematics to this. Time in the mountains is very very long and I was only going to be in this place for a very very tiny sliver of it. Besides, there were other people on the trail and no-one else was worried - at least, not visibly.

At the head of the scree chute the rubble turned to rock - which was far more fun. It was also steep, and though not technically difficult in climbing terms a fall here would be interesting for the few seconds left to you, so helpful spikes and lengths of old cable are fixed to the cliff in the hardest spots. Looking up I could see two figures above. They were being careful not to dislodge any stones, and so was I; there were people below me too.

Eventually the cliff ended in a broad terrace where a little mountain tarn glittered thinly, remembering itself as ice as the sun broke through the clouds. It felt like I had been climbing forever and the clouds were certainly closer, but the peak was still far above.

I skirted the lake heading slowly higher at first, then abruptly so up another steep groove between tottering towers of stone, the world opening out around me as the peak grew closer and the valley receded below.

If you are a scuba diver, ascending from the depths, you must exhale so that the twin balloons of your lungs nestled neatly in your chest, and now full of compressed air from the cylinder on your back, do not expand as you rise - no longer constrained by all that weight of water above. If you forget, and hold your breath, your lungs will expand to the point where they rupture in a final, fatal, agonising burst.

So as I rose on up the mountain through the day, feeling as a diver might in an ocean watching all those depths fall away below me - like an ascending diver I too felt expanded, but it was my heart swelling instead, as all the weight of the world was lifted from me and the sight of the mountains filled my gaze, so eloquently, piercingly, utterly.

And that my own heart might not also burst - to relieve that exquisite pressure, that pleasure so intense that it is also a grief, I laughed, I murmured to myself, and I cried out aloud … my words taken by the wind.

Reaching the summit at last, where all words become superfluous, where there is only rock and thin cold air and the clouds and the sheltering sky.

And you.

Because you can never leave yourself.

Though you can see yourself again, and listen to the wind.

There I sat, and watched, and ate what food I had, and a young Italian guy - arriving a little later - shared his grapes with me and accepted some of my chocolate and told me about his travels in my own country - rather surprised I think, to find some random Australian in Summer shorts sitting on his favourite mountain in an Autumn almost gale.

Me being me, I also had my notebook, and this is what I wrote - the freezing wind flapping the pages and numbing my fingers and telling me my time here would be brief….

From my notebook:

The summit of Cima Pisciadù, with all the vast architecture of the mountains arrayed around me - cream, dove grey and brown, layered and raised up in striated towers and dusted with a pale coating of scree - the ground down detritus of peaks long gone.

The sun plays peek-a-boo amongst the soft clouds, which cruise above on a growing wind, dappling the peaks with fast moving nets of light and shadow, hiding then highlighting ridges, gorges, sheer plummeting faces of enduring stone. Serrated spurs, smoothed plateaus and mountain tops receding beyond sight, like my dreams.

At this summit, sitting by this storm battered cross, down is the only direction now available. And there is so much of it, all around me, surrounding me; these deep wells of gravity waiting patiently while I sit, and watch the mountains, and write these words, before standing, turning, descending, and returning to the world...

Cima Pisciadù

Which of course I then had to do.

Picking my way carefully down the loose terraces of the summit pyramid was a reminder that, on a mountain, down is often harder than up because the route down can be harder to see and your feet have to find footholds out of sight of your eyes. I wandered off route briefly - soon realising that the shocking gulf in front was definitely not the way down.

Back at the flat terrace near the tarn I had a choice - to return the way I had come or to descend via a different valley and so avoid retracing my steps. It felt like I was almost down, and a different route back - though longer - was irresistible.

The rewards were as immense as the mountains, though the sight of the tiny thread of the path so far far below made my knees ache in anticipation, and my mobile phone screenshot map did not quite correspond to all the track junctions I came to.

Then I was finally down, really down, and it was done, and all my mindful moments on the mountain were changing - becoming something else - not the glowing instants I had been living within, balancing from one to another then the next, the way you cross a stream over stepping stones, but crystallising instead, forming gorgeous jewels of memory to be treasured, turned over, polished and shared.

To share them I had to leave. The day was ending and another kind of gravity was calling. I found the car, still sitting on the verge of the road below the Passo Gardena. A few other vehicles were there too and a group of returning climbers nodded at me as I drove away. Down to Corvara, then up the winding road to the village of Funtanacia, smiling to myself at all the fun I had certainly found.

I parked by the guesthouse and stumped up the stairs to our room on the second floor. Each step hurt, quite badly. My legs were saying “enough of up” - but this was the most important climb of all.

Opening the door, I found my destination, the one thing on the mountain I had been missing. She was sitting by the window in the sunset, finishing the little painting she had done for me while she waited, suffused with all her love.

Because this was the true summit of my day.

And now I have my title,

and so do you.