Seceda: Under the Needles

In mid-September we spent a few days in the Italian Dolomites, our first visit despite living on the other side of the Alps in Munich. We travelled by train to Bolzano, then rented a car for the journey into the mountains. After a night in Santa Cristina Valgardena, we drove to nearby Ortisei and took the cable car up to Seceda. Seceda rises to 2,519 metres on the edge of the Puez-Odle Nature Park. Its southern slopes are mostly alpine pasture, but along the northern edge the ground drops abruptly into steep rock faces. Beyond them rise the jagged peaks of the Odle group, whose name in Ladin, the local language, means “needles”. Great tilted layers of rock run across their flanks, as if the mountains had been stacked flat and then tipped on their side. It’s strange to think that the ridge we were standing on once lay under a tropical sea. Around 240 million years ago, this area was part of the Tethys Ocean, where layers of sediment and coral reef built up on the seabed. The remains of…