The mountain hut breakfast is its own kind of suffering.
Plain bread. Dry cereal. Sliced meat and cheese that has spent the night at altitude in ways you'd rather not think about. A giant thermos of hot water for tea. You eat what you can, fill your thermos, pull on your boots, and head out. There is no ceremony. The mountain doesn't care whether you've eaten well.
Dave gathered us outside in the cold morning air and delivered the day's brief with the economy of someone who has given it many times before. This would be our biggest day. Nearly 4,600 feet of climbing. The plan: skin up, attempt the Cevedale summit, ski down to Pizzini hut for a midday stop, then continue down the valley to Branco hut for night two.
It was a beautiful day. Bluebird sky, hard snow, the kind of alpine morning that makes you feel briefly invincible.
I was not invincible.
The cardio announced itself early and stayed. I didn't say anything. You don't, on these trips — not on day two, not when the doctor is moving like he was born at altitude and even the banker, technique still loose, is grinding upward with the stubborn patience of a man who lives at ten thousand feet. You manage it quietly. You control your breathing. You count steps.
What I didn't know — what Dave would explain to me later, almost as an aside — was that what I was feeling wasn't just fitness. It was altitude. I had come from sea level four days ago. My body was still negotiating. The slight nausea that arrived mid-morning, the heaviness in my chest that didn't quite resolve on rest breaks — these were not signs of weakness. They were arithmetic.
I didn't identify it as altitude sickness in the moment. I identified it as suffering, which is a different and less useful diagnosis.
We reached the base of the final push to the Cevedale summit in the early afternoon. From there the route steepened sharply — a long boot pack up an exposed face to the top. I looked up at it. The doctor looked up at it with the focused attention of someone who very much wanted to be standing at the top of it.
The decision was ours to make. Dave laid out the facts without editorializing: the summit was there, the time was real, the descent to Pizzini and then the traverse to Branco would take what it would take regardless of what we decided here.
We turned around.
It was the right call. It was also both relief and disappointment arriving simultaneously in the same moment, which is a specific feeling that anyone who has made this kind of decision in the mountains will recognize. You know it's right. You feel it anyway.
Pizzini
Pizzini hut is, as advertised, uniquely Italian.
The place is run by a tall man with a large personality and the particular confidence of someone whose family has operated this refuge seasonally for generations. His brother — slower, goofier, moving with a kind of cheerful inefficiency — wandered the dining room and deck performing cleaning operations of uncertain effectiveness. They were both characters in the specific way that people become characters when they've spent enough seasons at altitude dealing with exhausted strangers from everywhere.
I ordered pressed meat and potatoes. Everything came with potatoes. This seemed right and correct.
I could not eat it.
The nausea had followed me down from the summit attempt and sat with me at the table while the others ate with the appetite of people who had just climbed 4,600 feet and felt fine about it. I pushed the food around. The proprietor noticed. His expression — not quite disapproval, not quite concern, something between them — suggested that leaving food uneaten at his family's refuge was a choice he found personally difficult to understand.
I understood his position. I was not in a condition to address it.
Then the summit groups arrived.
Three of them, over the next twenty minutes — skiers who had made the push we hadn't, hooting and hollering with the particular elation of people who had stood on top of something and knew it. They were loud and happy and entirely justified in being both. I watched them order food and eat it with enthusiasm and felt the relief-and-disappointment feeling arrive again, sharper this time, wearing different clothes.
The banker caught my eye across the table. Neither of us said anything. There wasn't much to say.
Branco
Branco hut arrived like a reward we hadn't quite earned and needed anyway.
By the time we reached it the nausea had passed, the legs had found their second agreement with the day, and the surroundings were — there is no other word — surreal. A broad deck in the last of the afternoon sun. White peaks in every direction. Europeans of every nationality in various states of exhaustion and contentment, comparing routes and sharing the particular warmth of people who have been somewhere together even if they've never met.
We were all good by then. The group had the easy quiet of people who have been through something together and don't need to discuss it. The day had been long and hard and honest. The summit had been a decision, not a failure. The altitude had been a condition, not a weakness.
Dave was right about Cevedale. We'd been right to turn around.
We ordered drinks and sat in the sun and didn't say very much. The peaks did the talking. They're better at it anyway.