624 - Seceda Ridgeline
Today we took a gondola to the end of the Earth.
Also known as the Seceda Ridgeline, in Italy. The place looks like someone took Earth’s tablecloth and bunched it all up.
In order to get to the top of the colossal landmark, you need to take two gondolas that equate to over 8,000 feet in elevation gain. But the only reason I knew this is because of the needlessly complicated research I did on figuring out how to reach the top.
All I wanted was to be at the top around sunrise or sunset. That’s all I wanted. But unless you’re willing to hike 8,000 feet before sunrise or after sunset, it’s impossible because the gondolas are closed. For one of the most photographed places in the world. They open the gondolas after sunrise and close them before sunset.
It’s absolute insanity until you realize there’s one alternative. You can stay at a $500+ per night hotel ¾ the way up the mountain to cut this distance down. Oh, okay. Me and my coffee shop job will just go fuck ourselves.
At this point, my mindset switched to the next best thing, which was to go on a cloudy day. Then at least we’d have moody lighting conditions to shoot.
Cut to us drinking a cappuccino at the top of the mountain, where the steam of the coffee rolled off right into the landscape before us. It’s at this point that we realized all of that stressing to get up here at the perfect time was all for nothing:
God. Damn.
Some places truly make you forget about all your problems. Like the fact that I took my glasses out of my pocket to get a better look and realized they were completely scratched because of a rock I’d also left in the pocket months ago.
You know, let’s just deal with that situation later.
Despite my less-than-perfect vision, something else caught my eye. At first I thought it was a bird, then I realized it was a paraglider flying through the mist like James Bond:
Hard take, that’s gotta be one of my favorite shots of all time. Coupled with the image before this, the scale of the scene is absolutely monstrous. Then the mist came in and it all disappeared. Just like that.
My mind shifted back to the scratched glasses in my pocket. The only glasses I had for this entire European excursion. I put them on to see the damage. I wasn’t sure if it was the mist or the glasses, but I still couldn’t see a thing.
Welp. I guess that’s our cue to get closer.
Despite the amazing view from the top, the place had miles and miles of terrain to explore, giving us virtually unlimited angles to try out.
As we got closer to the edge, we began to pick up on the trends of the mist. It’d go in for a couple seconds, then out for a couple seconds as the clouds blew across the mountain. At one point a man emerged from this mist in this magnificent scene:
Notice how THICK the clouds are at that moment. Crazy how such a scene can only exist for a few seconds before it’s gone forever.
Finally we arrived at the edge and looked over. A lone tree stood on the bottom:
We walked around for a couple more hours, but at some point in this journey the mist left entirely and we were left with a starkly bright landscape. It was almost as if the caffeine high was timed with the clouds' departure. What a day it’d been.
As the dreamland faded into the distance, we descended the gondola to the mainland. All that was left with the stark reminder that I now had no glasses for this trip. I mean, I could see see, but I couldn’t see see. The glasses were pretty much useless in the bottom half.
The same fog that had given us such amazing photos had also somehow killed my vision. They always say be careful what you wish for- but now that'd finally proven to be true.
