Pleasant, definitely. But surprising? If you consider the waitress's otherwise friendly Italian face, currently hidden behind an antisocial plastic visor, her right hand gripping a futuristic-looking gun aimed at our foreheads, and a metre-high sheet of Plexiglas splitting a piccolo table with an espresso into two lonely halves – then no.
Among the trees lining the otherwise fairly busy dusty paths to the crags, spiders weave their sticky masterpieces, to which my sweaty face lends the noble quality of transience. Aaaargh! Yuck! In an outdoor shop in the town of Como, my question "Do you have climbing shoes?" gets the answer: "Just three pairs." And the carabinieri driving by under the sinking sun smile mercifully at our silver Caddy, surrounded by camping chairs and a little table where water is heating in a pot for €1.29 ravioli, placed in the shopping basket by a disinfected hand in a disposable glove.
And now, after a week spent sanding down our fingertips on limestone and gneiss crags and sleeping in car parks in the deserted regions of Piedmont and Lombardy, we're heading north-east.
"So you're not taking a waterproof jacket?" Ája's voice carries through the half-empty, gloomy space of a huge multi-storey car park near the centre of Madonna di Campiglio, as she squashes hers into her rucksack. Today's goal is to climb up below the rock spire of Campanile Basso and find a bivouac spot, from which we'll set off up the wall in the morning. "No, because it's not going to rain." It mustn't, it can't, or it's got nothing to rain with? It just won't. Meteoblue says so, and so does my imagination. I'm simply not taking the Gore-Tex. The lid of my pack has already risen alarmingly high, and ahead of us – or rather above us – lie 1,200 metres of ascent to the snow-fortified Bocca degli Armi saddle. Let's go!
Sunburnt necks take on a damp sheen under the afternoon sun, which is crossing the Adamello massif opposite at a leisurely pace. But it may not stay like this for long. The Brenta Dolomites are a strange place. In the morning, under blue skies, everything seems so carefree. Limestone walls, shaped by years of erosion into Romanesque curves, lonely turrets and fortified battlements, draw the eye like a magnet. But later – before noon – the clouds come. And they don't leave until dusk. They claw their way up the grey walls and get shredded to rags in the narrow clefts. Like mysterious phantoms they creep between the rock towers, bringing a gloomy mood and shrinking human existence in this inhospitable world – only to vanish, for the briefest moment, into the depths and, drawing back the curtain, reveal the scenery that members of the human race dare to come up here to see.
It's five in the afternoon and beyond the Bocca degli Armi the world ends. A snowfield, steep rock and then nothing. Just a dark grey void. The clouds are taking over the Brenta. But they don't look threatening. They're just here. And they keep our goal for tomorrow – the slender tower of Campanile Basso, soaring skywards from the labyrinth of rock – hidden behind a curtain of mystery.
We haul limestone rocks onto a flat spot on a rocky spur and build a little wall to shield two bodies from the chilly night wind sweeping in from the Adamello. We know the Guglia, as the Italians call the spire, is above us. We can sense its presence. But it stubbornly holds on to its mystery.
"I just felt a drop!"
So that's how it is. It's raining! Beneath grey shreds of cloud – which, going by our last five visits, I had taken for the usual local colour of the Brenta labyrinth rather than a harbinger of trouble – the sleeves of my red softshell jacket soak up drop after drop. Maybe it's just condensation? It's not supposed to rain, after all. But it is. So we look for shelter on a ledge under an overhang. You can sit here. But sleep? No way! Worst case, we'll scuttle down to the hut. It's not far.
Luckily it stops. And the moment we get the stove out, it starts again. Still just condensation?
Three times we go back to huddle in the dry shelter beneath the yellow wall, whose colour suggests raindrops rarely reach it. But with dusk, we finally get the view we had dreamed of for a night beneath Campanile Basso. The last cloud is drifting across the mountains, and now it has flopped down, along with the rest of its cumulus kin, many hundreds of metres below in the valley by Lake Molveno. Now we can stretch out on our modest little ledge behind the windbreak wall and, gazing up at a star-strewn sky, rest up for tomorrow's early start on the wall. "Good night."
The wind has picked up. It's cold. Does that mean dawn is coming soon? For now it's pitch black, so I just pull the hood tighter around my face with my right hand to keep more warmth inside my sleeping bag. Inside, I move my head torch to the other side so I don't lie on it with my right hip. My left one is bruised enough already.
"You asleep?"
"Not really."
"Got colder, hasn't it?"
"Yeah, it has... Whoa, did you see that?"
As if someone had flicked on the hallway light. Flash. The sky behind us lights up for a moment and dies down just as quickly. Except here the switch is controlled by someone mighty above us. A storm! But how? It can't be. The sky above us is clear. Nothing but stars... and there's that glow again! No thunder, though. It must be far away. But do we want to bet on that? Here? 2,700 metres up? With two sleeping bags and one waterproof jacket? God, no. Pack up!
It's a mad rush. I cram my sleeping bag, damp with night dew, into its compression sack and stuff my pack with whatever comes to hand. Done. But Ája is still wrestling with her self-inflating mat. Bloody hell, what an invention! Give me a good old foam mat any day. You fold it and off you go. My teeth are chattering. The sky lights up again. I'd really like to go now. Still no thunder. She's packed. Right, we're off.
A little lower down, sheltered from the wind by rocks, we have no reason to keep running. It's clear now – the outline of the cloud on the horizon is still lit up every so often by a brief flicker of strong light that turns even the dark sky above our heads blue for a moment, but it's moving away. We sit on cold rock and the clock on the phone says 3:20. Too early. Too early to squat here on a boulder for two hours until the sun is strong enough to let us do anything. In the beam of our head torches we look for even a tiny flat spot to finish our interrupted night. One seems decent, but... it slopes slightly and ends in a drop. "Come on, you don't toss and turn so much in your sleep that you'd slide off!" Well... hopefully not.
Campanile Basso. 11:11, and after eleven pitches we're standing on the summit. And the Brenta is already putting on its show again, one curtain of mist jostling with another for space, warning the engrossed audience that the morning romance is drawing to a close. The second act is coming. Enter the fog!
Just as the green strand of rope whistles through the air and whips up the dust at my feet, I feel a very localised dampness on my nose, which soon shows up visibly on my sleeves. Not again! But the timing is perfect. Abseiling in this would have driven me round the bend. Sodden ropes that tangle like hell, and water splashing into your face from the belay device like a windscreen washer. We change plans and from the saddle we run down the exact opposite side of the mountains from the path to our home on wheels. But the rain is getting heavier, and the vision of a massive wooden table graced with a bowl of pasta al ragù – the scent of Italy wafting from under the parmesan – and of steamed-up windows we're looking at from the right side, that is from inside, lures us to the nearby Tommaso Pedrotti hut.
But with thirty euros in our pockets, we won't be living it up here. We still have to get down today. When the summit of the hill above the hut comes back into view, it's a clear signal: now or never. Even though the pasta, washed down with half a litre of beer, protests loudly for the first few minutes and would much rather vote for a soft, cosy bed on the first floor than frantic legwork through slushy snow and fast-drying rocks. But a dark wall is pushing towards us. Another wave from the Adamello. It wants to squeeze us, give us a good soaking and then flush us away. Who'll be faster?
We reach the chapel above the Brentei hut, currently under renovation, as the first icy drops fall. Then comes the wind, a downpour, even hail. Hell. But we've already won. This will pass soon too, and in the next window we'll make it down to the valley. And next time I won't tempt fate with that Gore-Tex jacket – I promise, here beneath the cross.
I climb mountains. I write about mountains. I photograph mountains. And I always come back happy. It's written in my name, after all.
Asolo Freney Low GV trekking shoes
Asolo Apex GV trekking boots
Lowe Alpine Halcyon 35:45 climbing pack
Bridgedale Hike Ultralight merino socks
