The Fourth day of our walking holiday was one of the best days of my life! Schlern/Sciliar was the first Dolomite that we saw on the drive over to Kastelruth and we’d seen it peeking out of the clouds every so often throughout the week so far. I wanted to get to the top and walk along that ridge soooo much! But the weather forecast didn’t look too promising. We woke up early (just in case) but it was really misty. Somehow I persuaded Marc to head towards Schlern, but we weren’t that hopeful that we’d actually be able to climb it.

I had some feedback that I shouldn’t add so many photos to this blog…but I’m afraid I can’t help it for this one. I just spent hours narrowing them down, but I took quite a few! If you want to see a larger version of the photos, just click on them!

You have to climb up a hill, and then walk down into a valley before you can start to climb through the trees to Schlern. We figured if the clouds started to lift by this time, we could continue. The clouds were a little better, but they stayed on the North West peak. Marc made a deal with me that we could climb up to the clouds, but we’d have to turn back if it was still cloudy at the top of the ridge.

First we had to climb down into the valley. Why is it always so demoralising to walk down a hill, right before you climb up a mountain!? Ah well. Next, we walked through the gorgeous forest past a pretty waterfall. The path started to zig-zag up towards Schlern’s ridge. Most of the time, when we peeked through the trees, all we could see was the white mist and clouds.

I was really worried that the mist would continue to block all the views, and force us to turn back. As we climbed through the trees, the clouds were pretty thick on this side of the mountain. However as we walked up, the clouds finally started to clear! Mist be gone!!

It was a pretty steep, but spectacular whenever we got to see through the clouds.

It was a grassy, rocky wonderland.

Once we made it up to the ridge it was really clear. We got to meet all the cows who live up in the clouds, and get ready for the final climb up to the rock-covered summit.

We made it!

The world was cloud-free for about 30 minutes, so we had time to look around at the amaaazing views. I spent quite a long time taking this panorama. Then I spent even longer trying to spot all the places we had already explored down below. Clouds covered this summit for the rest of the day so we were even more chuffed by our lucky timing.

Once we’d climbed down from the summit, we walked along Schlern’s  main ridge. As we moved along, the clouds descended, so we didn’t get to see the surrounding mountains. It was a little frustrating as we were sure there were more gorgeous mountain views just out of sight.

After walking along the main ridge we had to climb down onto another pathway below the spiky tops of the Dolomites. We knew that there should have had good views of the surrounding Dolomites. To start with, all we saw was mist. But we were so, so lucky! Just as we arrived, the clouds lifted again. These photos don’t do the view justice, but I’ll post lots anyway.

These mountains seem like a gigantic, impenetrable, wall of rock.

This is where I did my jumping photo (at the top of the post)

The weather changed again at the end of this ridge. This time it started to rain really heavily, so we escaped to have some lunch in one of the walking huts.
By the time we set off again, the sky was grey and threatening, but it wasn’t actually raining very hard.

We kept walking around a corner to look back at Schlern’s ridge, and out to the Alpe di Siusi. It is really nice to see these views after a few days walking because we could look out for Mount Bulacia, Mount Seuc and all the walking routes we had already explored.

We were also spoiled by a new view of the Alpe di Siusi.

We were pretty tired, but still had enough energy to walk back across this gorgeous countryside back to our hotel.

Oh! And although I didn’t mention the pretty wild flowers on this day, I did still take photos of them. Some of seemed to grow straight out of the mountain rocks! My mum knew all of the flowers in my previous post, so hopefully she’ll know these too. Here they are:

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