Monte San Mauro

Spring break! The students at Kristen's school are all gone for the next week, off doing projects in various places throughout Europe. So for us it's spring break! We started our week off with a trip back up to our favorite place in the Dolomites: Alla Casetta. The weather forecast was for another rainy weekend, but we got lucky this morning and were able to do a quick hike up Monte San Mauro before the weather turned bad.

I did this hike without Kristen back in November so it was nice to do it again together. Last time I had a crisp blue sky day to do the hike. This time it was interesting because it started snowing right as we reached our destination at Chiesette di San Mauro, a 17th century church build precariously high up on the mountain (at around 1300 m). There wasn't much snow on the ground below this elevation, but we did manage to find a nice avalanche field to cross high up on the mountain making for a little excitement. Don't worry...I didn't make Kristen walk back and forth over the dangerous section to get this photo.

We reached the church just as it started to snow pretty heavily. The view was fairly obscured thanks to the dropping cloud bank and heavy snow, but we were still really happy to have been able to do a hike like this at all since we were expecting a total washout today. Since the wind came up and the temperature really started to drop we decided to eat lunch inside the little church to get some shelter and to warm up a bit...first time we've eaten lunch in an church...I think this is OK right??

From our little church shelter we saw some Camoscio (Chamoix) wandering around on the meadow trail that eventually takes you to the top of Monte San Mauro. Second time up here and only the sheep get the summit again! We'll be back in the spring for sure to finally summit the mountain. We ate our lunch quickly because the snow really started to fall and we didn't want to do the sketchy parts of the trail in too much snow. Kristen is heading down the trail in a hurry to get back across that avalanche field while she can still see the footholds that we dug out on our way up, and to get to a warmer elevation!

One last difficult part of the trail awaited us...crossing a washed out ravine just below the snowline. Thankfully there's a recently repaired steel wire handrail to keep your balance at this spot. Back in November when I did this hike alone this spot was much scarier because the handrail was mostly gone and the trail was mostly washed away. We've found that they do a really nice job maintaining trails in the mountains in Italy.

Check back again in a month or so to see some photos of me and Kristen from the summit of Monte San Mauro!