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Our drive into the Dolomites took us through some amazing scenery including the Valle di Lagi (Valley of Lakes).
Our first stop was at this amazing new natural history museum in Trento. Here is a photo of us all walking out of the main entrance to give you an idea of the crazy architecture of the place. They also had a biodome containing a Tanzanian jungle environment, hundreds of taxidermied animals and dinosaurs, and tons of information about physics, geology, biology, chemistry, history, mountaineering, and the Dolomites.
We drove on some pretty precarious mountain roads in the Dolomites but I can't imagine being a bus driver here.
The view from just outside the front door of our hotel the morning after we arrived.
The view from our hotel.
The Olympic ski jump training center was right at the base of the gondola we rode in the morning of our first day in the field. You might be able to see the person flying through the air just after leaving the ramp in this picture.
We took a second chairlift to get nearer to the top of the Latemar, a mountain and ski resort. All the poles here are snow makers and hold up nets to prevent people from skiing off cliffs and into the woods.
Hannah takes the same exact picture.
This is about where we stopped to...
...sketch a face of the mountain and learn about carbonate platforms formed about 240 million years ago.
The cows really wanted to ride the chairlift back down to their farm but no one bought them a ticket. Apparently the cows are turned out to graze in the morning after milking and know to return to the barn on their own a sunset.
The gorgeous red color on this hillside is from patches of a low-growing scrubby plant that replaces the grass in some places.
Adelweiss!
I made a little cairn balanced on the edge of one of the outcrops.
The last of the figs harvested at Coldigioco before we left. They make a great snack.
We made an inukshuk by the road while we waited for an hours or so for a road crew to repair a road destroyed by a landslide the next morning.
That little farm over there had a bunch of unruly pigs that the farmer had to chase around the hill to get them inside. He also brought his herd of cows back to the barn while we were at the outcrop on the left edge of the picture and they all walked right by us. He looked like a real traditional herding farmer with a sheep dog, walking stick, and Robin-Hood-looking hat that is native to the area.
We found a cave!
The view from the hotel the next morning when the clouds had left the peaks completely. It snowed in the mountains!
The reservoir just below the Marmalada glacier that we went to in the morning of the third day.
I rode the chairlift up with Sandro. It was less of a chair and more of a two-person basket however.
We saw a few people walking up this trail on our way back down. It must have taken them at least two hours to get to the top. We also saw fresh tracks in the snow from someone who had climbed up the glacier earlier that morning and...
...skied down!
The Marmalada glacier is the first glacier I have ever seen in person.
During WWI when the glacier was about a kilometer farther downslope, the Austria-Hungarians build a city housing about 2,000 troops and tons of supplies in the glacier. Here is a little bunker outpost used to keep a lookout for the encampment. You can see all the way to Austria in the very left edge of the picture. There was a major front of the fighting in this very valley and the Italians built a similar city into the rocks of the mountains on the other side of the valley. I was amazed to learn that each of Sandro's grandfathers (one Italian, one Croatian) each fought on opposing sides during the war. Apparently each day when the shooting was over the soldiers would leave the trenches and meet up with soldiers from the opposing side of the war at the local bar to play cards and drink. The Dolomites seemed less Italian and more a part of Alpine culture as seems to happen in many of the countries that share the Alps.
The whole gang. I tried getting in there but apparently didn't get the auto-timer to work. Colin got a better picture with me in it as well.
Travis inspects a little frozen puddle and a tiny patch of grass that grows even all the way up here at the glacier.
As the glacier melted, artifacts of the war dropped out and were collected by a man we met who has now put is collection on public display.
In the afternoon we drove up to Passo di Salle and saw all these parasailers flying around.
We even saw them taking off!
A little bit of stream bed geology anyone?
A bar up on the mountain had fancy fowl including these peacocks.
And this crazy chicken.
The parasailers fly by the bar.
On our drive out of the Dolomites we stopped at the Vajont Dam where on October 9th, 1963 a huge landslide fell from the hills above the reservoir and created an enormous tsunami that completely destroyed a number of villages downstream killing 1,900 to 2,500 people. The prayer flags here have the names of the hundreds of children that were killed that day.
The dam remains but no longer functions as a hydropower generating station like it did for the four years between its completion and the landslide. The water here is flowing through underground conduits from the reservoir that, although diminished, still fills the valley above the dam. We walked across the top of the dam from which I got this picture looking into the gorge below the dam.
The holes in the cliff side are where the road we took to get to the dam pops out of the cliff every once in a while. You can see one of the cities that has been rebuilt since the landslide in the valley beyond as well.
We walked through that nice covered walkway more than 200 meters above the river bed below.
