A night in the Piani Eterni national reserve

There is a place, deep inside the Dolomiti Bellunesi national park, not visited by many tourists, far from the more famous attractions that the italian dolomites have to offer. Here time has stopped and a magical aura pervades the place. As you have seen from the title, I'm talking about the Piani Eterni national reserve (translated, The Eternal Plains national reserve).

The sights are out of this world, and the name is well deserved, for what I've seen will stay in my memory, if not forever, surely for a very long time. Here you can find horses grazing the grass, free to roam the plain, with marmots occasionally calling and poking timidly out of their burrows, probably to see who is disturbing their otherwise quiet morning.

Then there are the countless cows, frightening at times as they monopolized every access to the alpine hut, where we were supposed to have breakfast. In the end we managed to get around them through the bed of a dried out creek, and we ate their butter and milk, out of spite obviously.

The night before was spent having dinner in the hut with two guys we met when we arrived, as they anticipated us by one hour in the ascent. The main course was obviously goulash with polenta, and some red wine to drink. Everything was perfect, and certainly so after the effort it took to get there.

After dinner we reached the rest of our group in the bivouac right at the start of the plain from where we came from. Not the comfiest, as it was missing any bed and the pavement was composed of unwelcoming rock, but such is the life of who frequents these places. There was an option of a more well funrished bivouac, some 45 minutes away after the alpine hut, but there was the risk of it being full, so we went for the safe option.