postcard 25: ski. pasta. prosecco. repeat.

A slushy week in the Dolomites.

When we open the door to the bar next to the tourist office, the three people inside look surprised to see us. The woman who was eating her Tupperware lunch gets up and sells us two tickets to the caves and says that her colleague will walk us down when we’re ready. He slugs the rest of his glass of wine, dons his poncho and leads us out into the rain.

We’re 20 minutes off the Italian highway, having wound up through the hills on narrow roads through tight villages to get to this random attraction I’d found online in an effort to make more road trip stops. We muse that $6 can’t possibly get us a guided tour, can it? But then we realize he’s accompanying us to open the gate. We are definitely the only ones here, probably the only ones who have showed up all day on this rainy Friday. We follow a path down into a gorge where a mixture of human made and natural limestone caves await. The one that had piqued my interest, where a specific cave cheese is aged, is closed, but we walk through caverns and along a ripping and roaring creek, forming waterfalls along the way. A slippery, rickety boardwalk with gaps in between the planks leads us across the narrowest portions where there’s no ground to walk on. We’re soaked, from the rain or the spray, it's hard to tell, but it’s silly and a little bit magical. We stop back at the bar on the way out and order glasses of wine under the awning.

The rain picks up as we drive into the Dolomites, the little mountain villages I’d imagined covered in snow are soggy and surrounded by green meadows. As we climb higher and higher, I’m getting more and more anxious for our ski vacation. As we climb the final pass, there’s snow on the ground, but it’s too warm. The moisture falling from the sky is still rain. We don our waterproof boots and scurry into the hotel.

It’s a 20 minute drive up and over a pass into Cortina d’Ampezzo where all the restaurants, stores and skiing is. We venture out into the dark and pouring rain to find dinner. At the very top of the pass the rain has turned to snow, fat wet flakes, but it’s over as soon as I’ve noticed it. We dodge crazy Italian driver in the poor visibility and park on the edge of town, hustling through the streets to get to the grocery store. The woman behind the deli counter doesn’t speak English, but she’s patient with us and slices paper thin prosciutto and salami and recommends a local cheese—lunch provisions. We tie up our plastic bag tight and head to a tiny pizza place that’s just a small case, where we order slices and arancini, fried risotto balls. We eat them in the rain on the walk back to the car.

The sun is just rising when we walk Hazelnut around the lake by the hotel. The moon hangs in the sky and there’s a skiff of fresh snow. There were perfectly flaky apricot croissants at the hotel breakfast and as we drive up to the ski area the day looks promising. The man in the rental shop had picked out all-mountain skis for us, a relief compared to the racing skis everyone else seems to rent in Europe, and we ski the groomers all morning. The mountains are playing peekaboo with the clouds and we catch a glimpse of them every so often. Once in awhile, the cloud settles on top of us and we can’t see anything at all, not even the chairlift. It’s icy up top, slushy in the middle and absolute peanut butter at the bottom, but that doesn’t stop us. We take a gondola across the valley to 5 Torri where we hiked this fall and drink too-strong spiked cocoas at the rifugio on top.

By the time we make it back to the mountain where the car is parked, the sun has burnt through the clouds and the groomers have been cut into the most perfect, slushy, low angle moguls. My face hurts from smiling so much as I slam down them, spraying everything in a glitter of slush. I don't want to stop, but Hazelnut is waiting, so we peel off our sweaty layers, return our skis and head back over the pass to eat charcuterie in bed with her.

We’ve scheduled equal numbers of ski days and hiking days so the whole family gets to experience the Dolomites, but we’re short on luck the next morning as we try to find some good snow. The first trail is mostly grass and the second one is crowded and all ice. We slip and slide our way around a lake and let Hazelnut zoom a bit before calling it quits and spending the rest of the afternoon reading in bed.

We find ourselves with time to kill before our dinner reservation so we order Aperol spritzes on a bar patio under a heat lamp. The waiter keeps dropping snacks off at our table, bags of potato chips and prosciutto toasts, and this might be my favorite thing about Italy. You can’t be expected to drink without a bite to eat. Dinner is luscious bowls of carbonara (me) and amatriciana (him) with housemade pasta and I try not to white knuckle the side of the car so hard on the drive up the slushy pass on the way back.

Our bags packed and fueled by croissants, the wheels of our little hatchback point west and we wind our way through the mountains to the next resort on our itinerary. There’s a stunning blue green lake I’ve seen online every time I’ve Googled the Dolomites that I imagine won’t be too overrun in winter. We pull up to the grand hotel on the shores of Lago di Braises and though it’s t-shirt weather out, we venture onto the frozen lake with several other groups of people and wander far enough away that Hazelnut can zoom to her heart’s content. She tries to dig and water slowly seeps into her hole so we hustle back to the cafe for cappuccinos before we’re on our way again.

I’ve never been somewhere that so clearly demonstrates the reality of our changing climate as the Dolomites in March. As we drive through the mountains, the green carpets of grass constrast starkly with white strips of snow trying to keep the season going for as long as possible. The resorts that should be open well into the spring are holding on by a thread in the first few days of March. The people in the villages have given up on winter completely and are gardening and planting fields. It’s a relief to once again climb into the sky, leaving behind the spooky signs of spring and finding snow as far as the eye can see. We stop at the top of Passo Gardena and gaze out across the peaks and valleys. That night we find a real craft brewery and drink beers and eat burgers, and our Colorado hearts are warm.

It’s our last ski day of the trip and in typical Mikaela fashion I’ve chosen a truly Type II fun adventure (Topher may still be categorizing it as Type III). We’re just about to set off, on time for once, when the manager of the hotel rushes out and tells us we can’t leave the dog all day. This seriously hampers our plans and it takes us an hour to decide to bring her to the ski parking lot with us. She’ll have to spend the day sleeping in the car instead of on the hotel bed, like usual. By the time we pick up our ski passes, the line for the tram is over an hour. We shuffle along in a current of rental gear and pushy Italians. I try not to think about the time warnings for the 44km ski tour as we pack into the tram like sardines. I can’t see anything past the crush of bodies but the ticket scanner keeps beeping long after the ticker above my head flashes “full”.

This lift accessed ski tour goes up and over five mountain passes, circling the Sella group, spiky and imposing looking peaks straight from a fantasy novel. When I’d read about the Sellaronda I’d imagined some intense feat only attempted by truly crazy skiiers, but the advertising plastered across the string of towns at the base of the mountain makes me think it’s decidedly something else. All I know is we have to be over the last pass by 3:30pm or we’re going to be stranded in a different town than Hazelnut.

The snow is already warm and sticky and we immediately take two wrong chairlifts before spotting the route sign. The slopes, which consist mostly of green runs and catwalks, are thick with beginners making huge S turns across the entire mountain and cutting us off at every possible moment, or falling like dominoes in front of us. We make another wrong turn but at least this time it leads us to a fun park where we ski through a snow tunnel.

This is more of an exercise in patience than anything else, I muse as we board yet another lift we’ve had to shove people to maintain our place in line for. The snow is getting sloppier and sloppier and the runs haven’t been groomed in days, with hardly enough snow to ski without a cat rumbling through. Choppy moguls have formed and dodging the hoardes of tourists in way over their heads becomes and Olympic medal sport. It’s hard to appreciate the breathtaking scenery when all of my focus is not getting crashed into. We shed layers and try to hydrate in each gondola, but it’s only getting hotter. In one town, there’s no snow under the chairlift, just a sea of greening grass.

I declare that we have enough time for a lunch break (my map reading skills are terrible so this statement was definitely dubious) when I spot a rifugio serving sandwiches and spritzes and we sit in the sun and eat prosciutto, pickles and horseradish on focaccia and the plate of charcuterie that gets sent out with our drinks. It might be the best sandwich of my life and I’m determined to make the most of our afternoon. We pick a black run off the map and decide we have time for a quick detour.

We should’ve known the detour was a bad idea when Topher lends his arm to a German woman who’s part of a group wearing matching bows on the magic carpet. She’s fallen and lost her poles and takes Topher down with her. He tries and fails to get up several times and there’s a liftie who runs over and some exclamations of “Mamma Mia!” and then finally we’re on our way up the chairlift to the black run, which I’m sure everybody watching is questioning our sanity for. The slope is icy as death and Topher falls and slides a long, long ways. He dusts himself back off and we continue on our tour. By the time we make it back to the car it’s been six hours, 20 miles of skiing and 20,000 vertical feet. We shower and collapse into bed and seriously debate skipping dinner, but I’m glad we don’t.

We’re led into a small room that’s acting as the wine cellar with bottles lining every wall, floor to ceiling. There’s a science-fiction-esque device that pierces the cork without removing it, so we have our pick of the hundreds of options on the menu. We opt for the only orange wine on offer, as we always do when we see one, and it’s spicy like winter. The server brings us arancini and mozzarella di carozza, literally a fried mozz sandwich, before the local specialty, a trio of spinach, speck and cheese dumplings swimming in butter. It’s the best meal of the trip.

It’s time to go home but we’re not quite ready yet. We linger over breakfast and pop into the food stores in town where we load our bags with pickles and apertivos and the fancy soap they don’t sell in Croatia. It’s snowed overnight, this time a sizeable amount, especially up high. At the top of Passo San Pellegrino (yes, that San Pellegrino), we navigate the little rental off the highway and down a snowy road into the forest. The path continues on foot and there’s feet upon feet of fresh snow. Hazelnut does the best snow zooms of her life, though at one point we both look down at the map and loose her. She’s gone off-piste and is stuck in a deep drift. We haul her out and she goes right back to running and jumping in the drifts. She’s relieved to find the snow is only sparkling to the eyes, it still tastes flat. She’s not a fan of fizzy water.

We all take one, last, deep breath of winter as a horse drawn sleigh passes us before climbing back into the car. Warm season is upon us and we can’t wait for the next adventure.

-Mikaela