IN THE SUNSHINE, the hot grass smelled like new-mown hay. A couple of butterflies flitted around the bottom ends of my walking poles. I stopped at the low pass and looked down on an extremely odd landscape.
Mountain ground ought to be cliffy, and vertical, and pointy all along the top. But this was almost flat. A bowl of wrinkled grey limestone, like porridge left to go cold. A little path that vanished as it wandered over the bare rock. And somewhere down over the edge of it all, a distant grey-green valley.
A fortnight later, a strange sense of déja vu. The same wrinkly limestone landscape hemmed in by little hills. The same small yellow flowers; the same blue valley far away below. But this time I wasn’t in the Yorkshire Dales, somewhere on the lower slopes of Ingleborough. This time, I was in the Dolomites.
ENCHANTING OBSCURITIES
The route instructions said we were to drop off this… what is it? A rocky meadow, or a rockfield with patches of grass? Anyway, we’re to turn down into the second blue valley on the left. But we’d totalled a mere 20m of ascent since leaving the Stoppani Hut on the other side of the watershed, weren’t at all tired, and we wanted more of the
