June 14: Son Forca

When I first laid out the tour, I knew that Mirusina for 3 nights was required. What made me add a 4th night was that the 3rd night was a Friday, and I did not want to start a tour on a Saturday. The issue with Saturdays is that lodging is hard to find on tour, and with a big pass in the offing I wanted the tour start on a Sunday to reduce time pressure. I could have cheduled a night in Cortina D’ampezzo, but my experience with Cortina was not good, plus the city was low at 1300m. I wanted to maximize altitude acclimation and Misurina at 1770m served my purposes much better. 

Getting our bikes out on Saturday morning, we got everyone all settled and then started riding after mounting the requisit gear on the bikes for our short ride.The descent from Misurina was fast and quick, but the climb up to Tre Croci from the Misurina side wasn’t as trivial as I expected, though still only about 200m. The Tre Croci pass sign is in a terrible place and not terribly photogenic compared with the rest of the ride. 

Arriving at the bottom of the chairlift, we locked up our bikes, used the batfrooms, bought tickets, and then got onto the chairlift to the top. I had low expectations for the hike, and indeed the first couple of kilometers were boring g and actually had me worried. The hike was entirely in the warm sun, a long what looked like a ski trail filled with skree and unpleasant to the feet. The “lakes” marked on the map were clearly feeder ponds for snow-making equipment for the ski resort. 

Once we got onto a narrow single track, however, the trail improved. Now we had shade, wildflowers, and what looked like a viewpoint to look forward to. At one point, I looked left and to my surprise saw a cave! I challenged Otto and Boen to traverse the cave. Bowen took that as a challenge as well and discovered that it was no big deal. After that, we all joined in and traversed the cave (which turned out to be a tunnel) The other side of the tunnel nothing less than a picnic bench as well as what loooked like an established fire ring as well as a view into Cortina D’ampezzo! We were amazed, spending many minutes taking pictures from every angle and enjoying the shaded picnic benches. We looked up and saw what looked like a viewpoint. Going back through the tunnel, we found the unmarked trails that led us to above the tunnel exit. 

After we walked on to the designated viewpoint and discovered that not only did it disclose more views of other mountains, it also revealed a trail down to the town of Cortina D’Ampezzo. A good hike would have been to start with a bus ride to the chairlift and use it to hike back to Cortina D’Ampezzo if you were staying in that town. Given the sparsely scheduled bus service, you probably did not want to reverse that hike! 

It was warm by the time we backtracked to the chairlift --- I’d used up all of my water, and the water taps at the top and bottom of the chairlift were all marked “kein trainkwasser”. The default in the Alps is for all water to be drinkable unless marked otherwise, so when you see a marking to the contrary you take it seriously. Fortunately, from the chairlift to the first hotel on Tre Croci was but a short climb easily done given our negligible metabolic activity. There, the hotel’s taps were not marked so we refilled our water and rode back up to Misurina. 

Cycling, as with hiking, rewards out and back trips as the return to Misurina is impressive. I noticed other hiking trails that could be used in the future, though I do not think we need to return to the area for a while. At Quinz, we stopped for lunch just so we could get relief from horrible Miralago food. 

After lunch, we dropped the kids. Arturo had looked into taking the 4WD service to the open air WW1 museum that’s on top of a plateau but had realized that it was too late --- there was a storm on the way and he would not have time to explore the museum. He had already changed into hiking clothes, but Xiaoqin, Mark, and I decided to ride up to the first lake we had visited 3 days ago before the storm hit. I would, of course, ride the tandem without Boen since he wasn’t going to ride if his brother didn’t have to. 

The ride up was hard, even though it was only a mile or so. As we arrived at the lake, we started feeling raindrops and to our surprise Arturo made it there in time to shoot photos for us. We took our shots, turned our bikes around and rode down to the hotel to put our bikes away just before the rain came down in earnest. 

Over dinner that evening, I briefed the next day’ ride --- after the ride down to Cortina, we’d exit as quickly as possible for the annoying 3-5km to the Pocul intersection, where I expected most of the traffic to be diverted to the Falzerago pass rather than the Giau. My advice to Otto Senior was for him to drive to the top of the pass and ride down to meet us. We would drop our luggage to the RV in the mornings before departing. It being a Sunday we would find lodging on the other side of the pass as suited us.