I had the impression the whole world was going to Seceda. The same ridge high above Val Gardena kept turning up in my Instagram feed. A grassy slope on one side, a sheer drop on the other, and beyond it the jagged Geisler peaks. The rest of my family are on Instagram too, but the name didn’t mean much to them. Apparently most of this international traffic was passing through my feed. Anyway, now I wanted to go.
We book online the evening before. It’s €74 each, with departure slots every half-hour. When we see the queue in Ortisei the next morning I’m briefly rather pleased with our foresight. Then we read the sign. The lift is closed because of the wind. Nobody knows when it’ll start again. Half an hour later we’re sitting in one of the little gondolas after all. While we were waiting, Angie noticed just how many people from all over the world were heading for the same mountain, particularly visitors from Asia. Now she’s at least as curious as I am. What is it about this place that brings people such a long way?
At Furnes, the halfway station, we change lifts. Or that’s the idea. Our excitement takes another knock. A larger cabin is supposed to carry us up the steep stretch to Seceda. People ahead of us have been waiting an hour. There’s talk of a mechanical fault in the queue. We never learn what’s actually happened. After another half-hour we decide to walk a little way and see how it goes. We can always turn back.
Others have had the same idea. First we climb through woods, then up a ski run. The snow has melted and the ground is suitably muddy. Again we notice how many young visitors from Asia are walking with us, many in their twenties. Some are climbing the slope in trainers that were still white down in Furnes. Trying to find a reasonably clean way up a muddy ski run is quite a good conversation starter.
Two of a group from Taiwan are studying in Europe. He’s driven a hire car from Deggendorf. She flew from Barcelona to Venice and hired a car there. We ask how they came to choose Seceda. Instagram, they tell us. Back home the view along the ridge to the Geisler peaks is one of those pictures everybody knows. Flying into Venice and driving on to the Dolomites is a familiar route. Often the next stop is Rome. We think of the national parks we’d still like to see in the US. Sometimes we talk about New Zealand. On their list is a mountain we can drive to for a few days away.
Along the way we meet a couple from Singapore. They share their biscuits with us. They’re pretty tired. By the time we reach the upper station, three hours and about 900 vertical metres later, so are we. There’s a ramen machine at the kiosk. It has a queue of its own.
At the top we run into some of the people we walked up with. They offer to take our picture with the mountains behind us. Three hours ago we’d never met. Somehow they already feel like part of our group.
By now the cable car is running. We walk the last stretch to the ridge alongside people who have just stepped out of a cabin. At the edge is the view of the Geisler peaks I know from all those photographs. It’s just as beautiful in person. People in designer outfits pose for pictures beside us. I notice the white shoes again. On the way up I’d wondered how our fellow walkers would get theirs through the mud. Now I look at a spotless pair and think, well, they came up by cable car.
Down in Furnes I’d have been quite happy to be first into the next cabin. Now I’m standing on the ridge, sweaty and rather pleased with the idea that we’ve earned this view. I’m struck by how quickly I’ve sorted everybody out. There are the ones who already feel like us. Then there are the tourists who get off the cable car for a photograph. And what made me want to come up here in the first place? That very photograph on Instagram. Had the lift at Furnes started half an hour earlier, Angie and I might have stood right beside them in the cabin.
Would I even have noticed their shoes?