The Kingdom Of Stone
PIZZO RONDENINO
2,747 m
Alpi - Alpi E Prealpi Bergamasche - Alpi Orobie
There are mountains that, despite lacking the elevation of the great massifs, command a silent respect and are often overlooked even by the most seasoned mountaineers.
Pizzo Rondenino, standing at 2,747 meters in Valle Brembana, is one of them: a stern peak resting in the shadow of the better-known Pizzo del Diavolo di Tenda.
Over time, that summit had become an obsession for me, an inaccessible, isolated fortress, and one of the very last peaks still missing from my collection in the area.
I had decided to tackle this ascent strictly solo.
I wanted to experience that encounter with absolute intensity, an intimate and unfiltered face-to-face with a long-coveted mountain.
Moreover, I knew that the relentless exposure across much of the route would have burdened me with the weight and worry of looking after climbing partners.
Alone, I would answer only to myself, free to let my upward momentum flow unhindered, matching the peak physical fitness of a training regimen pushed to the limit.
After careful consideration, my choice had fallen on a couloir that cuts deeply into the central section of the south face, an austere line that instinct told me would be the fastest and most logical option for an unroped ascent.
The unknown, however, was almost total.
No written route description existed for that gully, in a place where even the rare accounts of the standard route were fragmentary and muddled.
Only an acquaintance of mine had climbed it a couple of times in the past, and from him I had gleaned minimal, essential directions.
On a black-and-white photograph I had brought him, he had simply traced the line of ascent inside that gully with a pen.
As I looked at that simple sheet of paper, my thoughts drifted to Riccardo Cassin, when he showed up at the foot of the north face of the Grandes Jorasses holding nothing more than an ordinary postcard.
It was a bold comparison, yet it felt strange to clutch a piece of paper in the era of GPS and digital maps.
I felt like a man from the 1930s, catapulted onto that wall with nothing but imagination and a stroke of ink.
Going into the mountains solo, if one chooses to do so in a fast-and-light style, demands above all mental discipline, rigorous physical conditioning, and gear stripped down to the bare essentials.
For some time, I had been experimenting with this fusion of my two passions, running and climbing.
I wanted to move fast, partly because the minimalist style fascinates me, and partly for the sheer fun of it.
A month earlier, I had climbed Monte Sasso.
That peak, so close to Pizzo Rondenino, had served as a proving ground to test my new lightweight gear and calibrate my split times along much of the route.
Now, with that section already behind me, the logistics of the approach were no longer a concern, leaving me only to decipher the final climb toward my dream.
In the days leading up to my departure, whenever I thought about the impending climb, a fierce restlessness hounded me.
I had studied the logistics down to the smallest detail, yet anxiety clung to me even after my final training session.
Deep down, however, one learns to love that torment too.
Anyone who lives the mountains intensely knows that such restless anticipation is nothing less than the unmistakable sign of a dream about to unfold, the subtle thrill of a project that might soon become reality.
When I set out from Carona at four-thirty in the morning, that unease vanished at once.
In pitch darkness, pierced only by the beam of my headlamp, I felt strangely serene, my mind finally clear.
Near the waterfalls of Valle Sambuzza, my serenity was briefly interrupted.
From the woods below rose the sudden crash of snapping branches, a dull and violent sound, far heavier than anything I had ever heard before.
I had no doubt it was an animal.
Around that time, newspapers were persistently reporting the return of wolves along the Alpine arc, and my mind went straight there.
As I pressed on, however, the roar of water crashing against the ground swallowed every other sound, sealing me inside a bubble where I could no longer read the noises of the forest.
I kept glancing back over my shoulder with a tense stride, ten times or perhaps more, until I forced myself to dismiss that anxiety as pointless fear.
And indeed, as I left the waterfall behind, the roar faded and silence reclaimed its hold, restoring my calm.
The next day, reading the local news, I would discover that hikers had spotted a bear in that very area; who knows if it was he, that morning, who had set my heart racing.
I climbed in silence, passing Rifugio Longo toward Passo Selletta, and the fatigue of the approach slipped away.
Within that strangely persistent calm, as I drew closer to the base of the Pizzo Rondenino massif, my thoughts went straight to the line of ascent.
I knew several gullies plunged from the ridge, forming a chaotic maze of rock where it was easy to be deceived.
As I marched in the dark, that was my only fear: failing to identify the right line traced on that photograph and getting lost among the rocks before the real climbing even began.
Upon reaching Passo Selletta, before starting the descent toward the base, I stopped.
I pulled out the photograph a couple of times, trying to match the pen-drawn line with the actual relief of the rock.
It was a nearly frustrating exercise.
From that vantage point, the wall looked foreshortened, indecipherable.
I began descending, hoping that closing the distance would reveal the route more clearly.
Yet anyone who goes into the mountains knows this ruthless rule all too well: the closer you get to a big wall, the more the lines of ascent hide themselves, swallowed by the immense proportions of the stone.
The sun had just risen.
I found myself walking through the center of a magnificent amphitheater, framed by Pizzo del Diavolo di Tenda, Diavolino, and Pizzo Poris.
Among all the thoughts of that morning, the image I recall most fondly is a detail of light: the first morning sun suddenly striking the vertical wall of Pizzo Poris full-on, setting it ablaze.
In a contrast of emotions, I felt as though I were standing on the border between two opposite worlds.
On one side lay a grand vista that looked like a corner of Paradise, and on the other, the unknown of a peak looming before me like the gates of Hell.
When I finally reached the foot of the wall, the gullies revealed their full steepness.
Each offered a different perspective, yet all looked equally inaccessible, shooting upward without a hint of where they died out.
I consulted the photograph a couple more times, searching for landmarks in that fortress of stone.
In the end, I let myself be guided by my fifteen years of experience in wild ascents off the beaten path.
My trained eye told me to aim for the most deeply recessed couloir, the one that at first glance seemed the most logical line of ascent.
I started up, still scanning the face, though my mind was already made up.
I sought mental calm once again by holding fast to a thoroughly pragmatic thought: if it turned out to be the wrong gully, I would simply retrace my steps and look for other options.
Being right on schedule and blessed with favorable weather reassured me that I could afford a misjudgment.
As I neared the start of the route, my gaze kept drifting to the sky.
In the preceding days, I had studied the forecasts obsessively.
They called for afternoon clouds, and my greatest fear, the true nightmare inside that vertical labyrinth, was getting caught in the fog.
That morning, however, the blue remained crisp and motionless.
That clear sky, which would stay with me all day, infused me with a profound sense of peace, sweeping away the last trace of fear.
The opening meters greeted me with steep grassy ramps.
I climbed at a steady pace, feeling no bite of fatigue, moving in rhythm with the slope.
Instinct, even before sight, prompted me to veer slightly toward a small rock wall that promised more agile and logical climbing.
When the steep grass finally gave way to a tongue of stone, I placed my hands on the rock with my usual caution.
And there came the unexpected.
I had always pictured Pizzo Rondenino as a castle of shattered stone, made of the typical rotten and treacherous rock that so often characterizes the Orobie environment.
Instead, beneath my fingertips, I found solid, remarkably compact rock.
Mountaineering is a fragile balance, and Nature always presents the bill for your mistakes.
Mine was a trivial yet insidious sin of hubris.
I had set out in my lightweight kit, relying on movement to keep me warm, but at dawn, with temperatures around ten degrees Celsius and a stiff, biting wind, I had neglected to layer up properly.
The cold had crept into me, relentless.
The realization hit me hard at the exact moment I transitioned to climbing.
When I tried to fold up my trekking poles to free my hands for the scrambling ahead, my fingers were blocks of wood.
They were so numb and clumsy that I struggled even to release the locking mechanisms.
That loss of sensation was no mere annoyance, but a dark shadow tightening around my stomach.
Up on the ridge, amid the voids waiting higher up, touch would be my only insurance.
I had a vital need for sensitive hands to test every hold, to tell in a split second whether a block was sound or ready to betray me.
Finding my extremities numb right at the start of the real climbing left me feeling suddenly naked and vulnerable before the wall.
In the mountains, when the body sounds an alarm, the mind has only two choices: let itself be consumed by anxiety or enforce calm.
I chose the latter.
I pushed worry aside by focusing solely on action, refusing to give in to panic.
The only way to master that critical moment was to keep climbing.
Meter after meter, working around obstacles and negotiating stretches of easy scrambling, a new certainty began to take root within me: I had chosen the right gully.
The face flowed with my movements.
Slowly, the steady rhythm of the climb did its job.
Warmth radiated back through my body and a vital tingling awakened my fingers, restoring the precious sensitivity I so badly needed.
And just as my hands began reading the stone with confidence once more, I looked up beyond the slope and saw the line dividing rock from sky.
The ridge was coming into view.
Just before I peered over the crest, the few essential words of my acquaintance came back to me.
He had advised me not to gain the ridge crest immediately, but to stay slightly below its profile, traversing toward the summit.
I followed his advice, and the mountain, true to expectations, granted me a logical and unexpectedly straightforward passage.
Then, at last, I topped out onto the ridge.
The visual impact was electrifying.
Before me yawned a panorama of wild, fearsome majesty: an unbroken sequence of jagged spires, a serrated and utterly hypnotic knife-edge.
It was a realm of absolute stone, a fantastical, primordial world that seemed to belong to another dimension.
In all my years in the Orobie mountains, I had never witnessed such brutal beauty.
Facing that vertical abyss, I felt a tremor of pure fear that lasted only an instant.
The sheer beauty of the place possessed a magnetic force capable of quieting every dread, turning vertigo into a lucid stillness.
In that moment, immersed in that silence of stone, I knew for certain I was in the right place.
When you leave home, warm and safe, the mind is invariably assailed by doubt.
You ask yourself a thousand questions, wondering whether it makes any sense to go risk your life chasing exposure, especially as maturity forces reckonings and reflections you once ignored.
They are heavy questions, impossible to answer down in the valley.
But up there, before such a spectacle, all uncertainty dissolves.
The staggering majesty of Nature answers for you, making you understand that what you are experiencing holds profound meaning.
And within that fullness, a veiled melancholy takes shape, a genuine sorrow for those left behind in the valley.
You think of your parents, your acquaintances, those living sealed inside the reassuring routine of everyday life.
You know they will never lay eyes on such grandeur, nor ever fully grasp the call that drives you to seek it.
As I took my first steps along that crest, an unexpected calm continued to guide me.
Overall, the rock proved sound.
True, some blocks shifted here and there, but the restored sensitivity in my hands allowed me to test the stone continuously, block after block, with zero margin for error.
Visually, the ridge remained imposing, at times terrifying, yet step by step I realized it was a manageable obstacle.
The very geometry of the mountain offered further reassurance.
Every demanding, exposed section was followed by providential resting spots, natural ledges where I could pause, breathe, and above all reset my mind for the passages ahead.
Everything flowed in this poised balance until I found myself standing before the final section, the summit pyramid.
Looking up at that final bastion, I was literally paralyzed.
It looked utterly unclimbable.
Most intimidating of all was the side wall of the peak, a smooth, compact slab reflecting the sunlight almost like a mirror.
That icy glare conveyed a sense of absolute precariousness, amplifying the void and making the wall appear, to both eye and mind, far more forbidding than it probably was in reality.
Yet my approach to mountaineering has always rested on ironclad logic: take it one step at a time.
When I come up against difficulties, I lucidly assess the commitment required to move forward while simultaneously checking whether I can easily reverse my steps.
It is this exact guarantee, the certainty of always being able to downclimb, that convinces me each time to push further and keep exploring.
With that pragmatism, I tackled the final spire.
As so often happens, up close the mountain proved more forgiving.
Closing the distance, I found the right passages with unexpected ease, weaving through a maze of sharp ribs, angled slabs, and shallow rock gullies.
As I climbed higher, an irrepressible joy began to swell inside me.
I knew the rock was my friend and had granted me passage.
I had made it, and so it was.
I reached the summit.
There, swept up in uncontrollable emotion, I did something I had never done in all my years of climbing: I applauded myself.
Then, on instinct, I stepped up to the stone cairn marking the top and kissed it.
I was finally up there, on Pizzo Rondenino, the peak I had dreamed of for so many years and never thought I would be able to reach.
My breathing began to steady, and my memory drifted back to my earliest years in the mountains, when I used to gaze up at those majestic peaks from the valley floor.
I used to wonder whether I would ever be capable of climbing them, watching mountaineers from afar with admiration and reverent awe.
And now here I stood, atop one of the most formidable mountains in my Valle Brembana.
Turning around, I could take in a full 360-degree panorama of the surrounding peaks, mountains I had climbed one after another through all those years of adventure, the silent companions of a lifetime.
Before starting down, I bade farewell to the summit and thanked it for the climb, a personal ritual I repeat on every peak.
There was a faint twinge of anxiety at the thought of reversing the most exposed sections, but the moment I placed my hands back on the rock, it vanished.
I felt at ease, deeply in my element.
In those moments, I had the unmistakable awareness that I was born for this.
The rock section went smoothly.
For the descent down the gully, however, I had to rely on the GPS track recorded on the way up with my Garmin watch.
From above, I struggled to spot the lines of least resistance.
The mountain had reversed the rules.
The singular contrast of this adventure made me smile: having reached the summit guided by a photograph printed on a scrap of paper, only to rely on technology to find my way back to the base.
Reaching the bottom of the couloir, I cast one last look back at Pizzo Rondenino and set off at a brisk pace toward Passo Selletta.
There, I shed my mountaineer's skin.
With a quick gear transition back into running kit, in barely forty-five minutes I was back in Carona.
Whenever I tackle the mountains with this drive and speed, I inevitably find myself sealed inside a bubble, suspended in a parallel world.
The sheer velocity of the action leaves no mental space to immediately process what I have just accomplished.
Yet experience has taught me a precious truth: the most intense emotions do not detonate right away.
They will knock at my door in small doses over the days to come.
Perhaps that is the truest way to savor them, sipping them slowly rather than burning through them in a single instant of euphoria.
It is precisely these experiences that forge the spirit and sharpen self-awareness in that stern art of going into the mountains.
To those down in the valley who skeptically ask what I go looking for up there, I can only answer with silence.
I thank Nature for granting me the privilege of witnessing and living realities that most people cannot even imagine, emotions so deep that no photograph could ever truly capture them.
For an instant, up there, I lived in a world made of stone.
It was a fantastical, almost fairy-tale realm that words, unfortunately, struggle to translate for those who remain anchored to the plains.
Yet perhaps it is this very difficulty in putting it into words that makes it even more mine: an intimate moment that I only wait to relive on the next adventure.