Saturday, 7.7.2012

When we woke up at six it was raining again. We weren't too hopeful, had breakfast and then it cleared a little, so we decided to try going up to pass Angeloga. It wasn't that easy to leave Chiavenna hut, seeing it was starting to feel a little bit like home. Not had we spent very little for three nights and two days, but Monica also gave us a big discount. We would have paid about three times as much in Switzerland. At nine we started to climb up to pass Angeloga which was a very pleasant and beautiful.

The view down at alpe Angeloga, capanna Chiavenna and the lake.

The weather turned out to be stable so we felt quite confident that we would be able to walk the path we wanted. I was a little nervous because after passo Angeloga the path was not marked and despite GPS and Maurizio's orientation skills I wasn't entirely at ease. It worked very well even though we didn't take the path the Swiss book had suggested, but a slightly different one and when we reached the old ski station we were very surprised to find that there was a marked path that led us right up to the passo Sterla. Beautiful landscape, the path was at an altitude of about 2400m above Lago di Lei:

The view from Passo Sterla (when the fog lifted a little):

 

And this is the view down from passo Sterla back at where we came from:

We were greeted by fog when we arrived at the pass, but saw enough to go ahead without problems. It was a great walk and we couldn't believe that we had actually had a day without rain, storms, loads of insecure snow or other complications. It took us seven hours to arrive at rifugio Bertacchi, we climbed 1074m and went down 960m, our highest point was 2860m.

So we arrived quite early at Bertacchi, which is a lot smaller and simpler than capanna Chiavenna, but very nice:

Most probably we saw eagles walking down from passo Niemet to the hut. It looked like eagles, even though another possibility is that they were vultures, but Fabrizio, the landlord of Bertacchi confirmed that there are three couples of eagles that live near the hut on Spadolazzo mountain, the mountain we planned to climb the next day.

This is a border stone between Italy and Switzerland and I shortly considered crossing the border to update my blog. I can't use my HTC because I have hardly any credit left and my Internet package is valid only for Switzerland, but it would have taken too long.

The hut was packed, also a new experience seeing that I have been almost always on my own so far. The two families that run Bertacchi are extremely nice and a little alternative, a kind of eco-hut with eco-products and so on. We had another incredibly good dinner and then played scopa. We have taken to playing scopa, mainly forced by bad weather, but Maurizio always has the settebello. Darn. It started to rain about half an hour after we got to Bertacchi and the forecast was - guess - not good.