Crossing waterfalls, changeable weather and cows attack | Day 8 of TMB Rifugio G. Bertone-Rifugio W. Bonatti, Italy

The day started with a little drizzling rain and very gloomy weather. During the night we felt a lot of humidity in the air and it was quite cold. The place we found was very nice and secluded and nobody disturbed us – we only heard some sounds of the mountain goats at night. All things were wet including the tent. And we hate when that happens because it means carrying extra weight.

We had our leftover cereals for breakfast and began to descend down. The downhill going to the trail was very steep and it was incredible to believe that we did all this uphill yesterday in the evening in search for the campspot when we already were very tired.

The rain stopped but the mountains were still covered in clouds. All that day the trail was going on the side of the mountain through the forest paths and several beautiful waterfalls. There were no extreme parts. The weather was very unstable and one moment the sun was coming out and the other it was raining again. With the sun it was quite hot but with the clouds it was chilly so we had to put the warm clothes on and off that day. We met several big cow pastures on the way and there the routes got a bit confusing because of the cows who made paths in every direction. But the steps of the people guided the right way.

We were noticing the differences between Italian and other Roman languages that we know like Spanish and French and realized that it was something in between. There are quite a lot of words similar to both of them. But when we heard it from people we didn’t undestand most of the words, in written form on the other hand it was more undestandable. And in this region close to Mont Blanc a lot of people were still speaking French. And everyone understood English. So there was no problem with that. For now we learnt several greetings like “Buongiorno, Ciao, Buon pomeriggio, Buona sera” and “Arrivederci” for Goodbye. Also the word “Grazie” of course.

We quietly got to the Refugio Walter Bonatti, had our snack and saw the big clouds coming out from the other side of the valley. It started to rain soon and we decided to wait for it to stop under the refugee roof. After an hour or so the rain seemed to stop and we left to continue the trail. We wanted to search for the camp spot from now on along the trail. We hiked only for a km or so and didn’t have time to get far from the refugee house when we saw the another big dark clouds coming our way and we knew that it’s gonna rain again and this time it seemed to be a thunderstorm. Fortunately we were close to some farm abandoned buildings that were in quite a bad shape with a half broken roof but one house looked better. We just had to push on the door and it was open. So we had to stay there for another hour. It wasn’t raining that much but if we were out on the trail we would be all wet.

So seeing this unstable weather and more clouds in the sky we decided to descend down to possibly find some place to camp there on the way. And as we had already some experience with this relief yesterday when we saw some trees higher up the trail we knew that it can be our potential campspot. And there actually was some flat spot fortunately and some cow dung made us think that it was used for pasture purposes. So we were happy to find this place very easily and even had time to cook and eat our rice with mushrooms out of the tent enjoying the nature around. Then suddenly it started to rain again, first drizzling and then quite heavily. We got inside our tent and had to go to sleep at 19pm because it got really dark. The thunderstorm over our heads was very disturbing and the rain didn’t stop until the morning…