Alive mountains

Ok, this is a blog, after all, not just a place to post photos. For that there is the gallery. Here is to tell stories. Using images, right, but more like an excuse for the stories. Like the story of a friend of mine, and his mule...

This is one of my favorite mountains. The highest point in the Liguri Alps, between Piedmont and the sea, is made of a rock resembling dolimites, but much more brittle. A paradise and a curse for rock climbers, and a place truly rich in stories.

Not far from this mountain there is a mountain hut, the rifugio Garelli. Now a modern construction that functions during the summer as a full service hotel, in the past is was a modest building made in stone with a curved roof, which burned to the ground in 1987. The original refuge was maintained in operation by a mule conductor that I visited many times in the long winter afternoons of many years ago. In his later years he was spending most time in his stable, making brooms with thin birch branches. Whenever I could, I was going to sit with him around the hot cast iron stove, and listen to the stories of an age long gone.

This part of Italy during the second world war was the theatre of ferocious fights between the “partisans” (resistance patriot fighters) and the german and fascist forces that held a firm grip on northern Italy at the end of WWII. Many people in these mountains were part of the partisans; other were just caught in the crossfire. This is a period of which my friend didn’t like to talk about, and I have always been puzzled by what happened to him during that period. I only know that during the war he was drafted in the army, sent to Russia, where he barely made it back in one peace. As a fact, he didn’t join the resistence when he was back, but I don’t know if that was because he wanted peace, or because he didn’t like what the partisans were doing.

One thing that he probably learned in the army was how to conduct a mule, and he spent the years following WWII to carry loads with his mule on and off these mountains. Among the people for which he worked were the rock climbers that after WWII were opening climbing routes all over the Alps, finally reclaimed for peaceful activities. Never a climber himself, he was the person everybody contacted to know the secrets of these mountains, which he new better than anybody. Many of the climbing routes on the Marguareis were opened by people that in their ascent where helped by my friend, and his mule.

He died a few years ago. On the wall of his stable there is a mural painting of him, with his mule, looking towards the mountains he traveled for many years.