In September 1975 I was 22 years old, I had a 17-year-old brother, a Aermacchi Harley Davidson 350 motorcycle and a desire to head to the mountains. Combining the above ingredients, one Saturday we set out in search of a classic climbing route in the Pesarine Dolomites that was suitable for our skill level. The evening ascent to the Fratelli De Gasperi mountain hut already promised humidity and fog. We were the only ones there, plus Pierino Gonano, the manager; vegetable soup and cheese with polenta on the kitchen table with the wood-burning stove on. Then the usual after-dinner conversation, which included an offhand quip made by Pierino that I couldn’t get out of my mind. “This year, I’m leaving it all, I’m ditching my mountain hut. I sacrifice too much for too little; I’d sooner move abroad.”
The next day, haze and clouds brought in on the Sirocco winds crashed against the limestone cliffs. We chose a classic route that’s easy and quick: the Gilberti trail to Creton di Culzei. We returned from the peak in the rain, which followed us to Udine, where a “race car driver” in his Fiat 500 skidded on the wet roads, rear-ended us, wrecked my motorcycle and smashed a few of my innocent brother’s ribs. What a day! But the big news story was that De Gasperi was looking for a manager for the 1976 season.
Give the above, I should have come to the appropriate conclusions and let it go. But instead, that winter I did everything I could to take over the mountain hut. In April, after having signed the contract with the Tolmezzo branch of the CAI (the Italian Alpine Club), I had already purchased equipment for the kitchen and dining room, and all the necessary linens. I had even procured a used Marian-blue Renault R4. I had struck a deal with a semi-professional cook and, on 5 May, I remember the date exactly, I had gone to buy 108 bottles to store the wine that I would be serving.
Please take close note of that date: 5 May 1976. The day before the catastrophic Friuli earthquake.
However, I had a valid antidote against misfortune, the serious kind, on my side: youth, foolishness and determination. So, armed with my 23 years, a girlfriend who came up from Udine with provisions every weekend, driving our R4 with her learner’s permit, and a practically private cook, I opened the refuge from June to September. I fulfilled my obligations, even if financially it was an absolute disaster. But there was a future, it couldn’t get any worse, and good luck would certainly come in 1977.
Over the winter we decided that: we’d get married at the mountain hut on 21 June, that way, seeing that both of us would forever remain at the hut, my wife Chica would cook. Our friends would come up the day before the wedding, it would be a big mountain party, everyone’s invited. The principle of natural selection applied: those who couldn’t make it, won’t attend the party, too bad for them. About 120 friends were scheduled to come up and we had about 1,000 things to do, including buying the wine, the good kind, a task which my father-in-law was in charge of.
Two days before the wedding, the demijohns were loaded upon the cableway that I, as usual, would retrieve from above; an operation I had completed hundreds of times already. But that time, a rare and extraordinary bout of bad luck struck out of the blue. As I retrieved that precious cargo, I put my right hand in the pulley of the leading cable, reducing my beloved hand to a bloody rib-eye steak pulverized by a butcher. The result? Descent by foot in the usual fog, a visit to Tolmezzo Hospital, 6 torn tendons, 9 fractures, 6 operations, the first of which lasted 8 hours and the resulting ‘tucking’ of the hand into my belly, affixed there for 31 days. A real mess.
No matter, we were still going ahead with the wedding! But first I had to heal. So, after sleepless nights spent trying to clench my fist, on 9 September I climbed the usual Gilberti trail (grade 4) with my hand and my brother, taking turns going first. I could get married and so it was. The wedding was special, our friends were happy, the weather and the mountains were fantastic and, even if the date of 11 September brings a global tragedy to mind, to us it remains an incredibly joyful day.
This time, however, I said enough is enough. In two years, I had lost a good amount of money and almost a hand. With tears in my eyes and a heavy heart, I had to leave the mountain hut.
But since that far-away time, all mountain huts have been something special for me to observe carefully, to experience with fondness, to care for because they’re unique, extraordinary and peculiar, like the men and women who manage and live in them.
Saying “mountain hut” is like saying “home”.
But I should be more precise: a shack or a castle?
At De Gasperi we had just one Acme 500 motorcycle with a rope start (a rope for sure, the starting less so) which, manually shifting the drive belt, could operate the cableway or the generator, if it felt like it. Of course, it wasn’t connected to the ENEL power grid and the telephone was out of order when there were storms, on account of the lightning which, often landing on the steel cable, would travel up the line and unload on the mountain hut. There was no refrigerator and certainly no freezer; for hot water we had to use the stove; for potable water, the spring and pump were 200 meters downhill. Whenever necessary, you would have to abandon the kitchen and dining hall, load up 20 kilos of fuel on your back and go turn on the baulking motor, or simply go without water. But we had beds for over 80 people on squeaky cots and just two toilets, conveniently placed on the landings of the staircase, which also were used by the patrons of the café-restaurant.
What times, patience and enthusiasm our patrons must have had; what hard times for us when it rained on Sunday and we had to feed the pig the big pot of bean soup and toss out entire racks of ribs! I’m reminded of it every time I open the door of a new mountain hut, and I think: “I wonder how they do it?”. I check to see if there are ENEL power lines, I look at the cableway, I seek out the water tank and the pump and I study the toilets and all the details that turn that mountain hut into a more or less manageable place.
It went on like that for years, from the cosy huts in our homeland to the comfortable and extravagant lodges in Austria and Alto Adige, to the spartan huts of Slovenia, to the historic monuments of the Western Alps, where you had to don your crampons to use the outhouse at night. I’ve sought refuge in makeshift shelters while climbing Ararat in winter; I’ve stayed in stone huts, the legacy of French occupation, in Morocco’s Toubkal, where you won’t find anything to eat but you can purchase wood to burn in the fireplace. I even slept in a mountain hut (or better yet, a winter shelter) on the island of Crete during a ski mountaineering traverse, on a wildly windy night. From the Regina Margherita lodge on Monte Rosa to the Vallot Hut on Mont Blanc up to the refuges on the valley floor which make an end-of-trip beer special—walking into one stirs a feeling and an inner curiosity that put me at ease.
But let’s go back to 1977. After definitively and sadly saying goodbye to managing the De Gaspari mountain hut, I decided to put my surveying degree to good use. I opened a studio, starting designing, planning, directing construction yards and building. But the mountain hut continued to occupy an important corner of my memories and would come to the surface like nostalgia that expects answers. The chance to go back and do something for mountain refuges appeared about ten years ago. During a ski mountaineering trip, my friend Sebastiano Parmegiani, chairman of the Friulan Alpine Club (the SAF), asked me my opinion on the renovations to be done at the Gilberti lodge. He wanted to pick my brain about a few technical aspects before authorizing the project with the board. The project had been submitted by Promotur and the work was to be done by a company paid as agreed by the transfer of the land on which the station of the new Prevala cableway was then built. It was a hefty financial commitment for the SAF, which had negotiated every financial and legal aspect of the transaction with the counterpart Promotur, delegating the creation of the executive plan to the company. The proposed plan was surprising, to say the least. It included the replacement of the still-functional diesel furnace with two 35-kilowatt electric boilers, which was supposed to have powered a hydraulic circulation system that would then be distributed to the radiators in every single room. That’s just one example. The entire refuge would have been gutted and completely changed according to Promotur’s specific way of approaching the mountains. Changing an already-approved project once it’s underway isn’t easy, but we were lucky and the engineer at Promotur that we worked with day after day was open-minded and reasonable, changing, adding, compensating the costs and truly hustling, “cumbinin”, in order to create something that I find satisfying. Those who, on account of their age, remember the state the old Gilberti hut was in and compare it with the current state, can’t help but see that everything has changed but nothing was turned upside-down. You can’t work miracles, especially if there are strict environmental protections and the budget is small. But today the mountain hut is welcoming, warm, dry, bright and inviting. Of course, some will say that there is room for improvement, but that’s true for everything under the sun.
At that point, being appointed manager of the four mountain huts of the SAF was logical and coherent. Thus began a personal and professional adventure which lasted ten years, in which I was enriched and entertained, where I worked hard, and I got to know new contexts and people.
And that’s about it from me. My friend Alessandra asked me to write an article for the long-running In Alto magazine published by the SAF, and I suggested mountain huts as the topic. I thought it would be a short piece, the bare minimum to update SAF members, but my hand and heart got a little carried away by personal memories and emotions. I would like to conclude with a quote, an idea that isn’t mine, a wonderful poem by Leonardo Zanier, Ogni Sera. He lived in Comeglians and from his house he saw the sunset in Val Pesarina (il Cjanal). Down at the bottom of the valley, below the crags, is the De Gasperi mountain hut and there once was a young manager who, from the door of the hut, saw the same sunset and watched the valley below become ever darker.
I would like to dedicate this poem to Zeno and Valentina, the young managers, to Irene and Fabio, to Caterina, to all the managers who stubbornly keep their mountain huts open. I like to imagine them at sunset, after a day of hard work, at the door of the refuge, enjoying the last ray of sun that illuminates their peaks.
Il dì ch’al clopa
al trascina i siei ros
su pas monz di Cjanâl
e sot
la not
a glot las vals
e impia la poura dai oms
As the day decomposes / it drags its reds / on the rocks of Pesariis / and below / the night / swallows up the valleys / and inspires fear in men.