My Beloved Dolomites are Crumbling

Anna Bressanin for the BBC:

True to its name, the Five Towers – a small, iconic mountain range in the Dolomites (Eastern Italian Alps) – resembled five stone fingers spreading up towards the sky. One night between 4 and 7 June 2004, one of them, the Trephor Tower, came down. The Rifugio Scoiattoli – a chalet so close by that patrons can easily stroll to touch the rocks even after eating too much polenta – hadn’t opened for the summer season yet, so no one heard a thing. One morning, they saw the Trephor, a monolith of more than 10,000 cubic metres – the size of the leaning Tower of Pisa without the bells and the tourists – lying down horizontally.

The Cinque Torri have been one of my favorites mountains since I first visited them as a teenager. This June I finally made it back there when I ran Lavaredo Ultra Trail in Cortina. Back then I fell in love with the place all over again, but I had no idea about one of the towers having had fallen just a few weeks prior to my visit.

What I was aware of is the reason of why these mountains are crumbling, and while some of it has to do with climate change some of it is just the normal state of the mountains:

“The DNA of every mountain is to come down,” says Giovanni Crosta, a professor in geology at University of Milan-Bicocca, who studies the relation between climate and landslides in the Alps. “It’s the destiny of every vertical thing.”

Five or twelve?

Second, although it’s undoubtedly sad that one of the Five Towers came down, there were actually 12 towers to start with – they got shortchanged on the name because only five are visible against the sky from below. So, the fact that the number of towers doesn’t match its official name is nothing new.

No matter the name, I cannot wait to get back there soon and revisit this place… and have another mountaintop beer at Rifugio Scoiattoli.