56 The Mountaineer 
THE DOLOMITES 
A. H. ALBERTSON 
<9 UR route through the Dolomites covered a hundred miles 
and lay from Innsbruck in southwestern Austria to Toblach, 
from Toblach to Cortina, and then down the military road 
that hangs and winds above the Ampezza Valley to Belluno 
in Italy. 
The Dolomites form the most eastern sweep of the general alpine 
upheaval and are a strange mountain formation quite unlike the Alps 
proper and probably unlike anything else in the world. They have 
their base two or three thousand feet above the sea and rise five to ten 
thousand feet in height without snow caps—being too close to Italy. 
Each Dolomite is so different from any other that it is impossible to de- 
scribe them en masse except a few common characteristics. They 
might be considered a museum of mountains. While there is no domi- 
nating pile like Mt. Rainier, there are dozens of terrific rock masses of 
eternal strength and huge, fantastic skyline. The profile of one has 
the appearance of a gigantic locomotive a mile long—boiler, smoke- 
stack, dome, and cab complete; some are like cathedral spires; some 
are like battleships; and some like the great wall of China, or perhaps 
like the final fortress of all the earth at the end of the world, built to 
withstand shafts of lightning and the dynamite of earthquakes. Tow- 
ers, battlements, obelisks, and ruined masonry of ancient castles and 
fortresses mount up at times several thousand feet high above the 
sheer walls. 
The rugged and self-asserting Dolomites show no definite plan of 
arrangement like most other mountains, but seem to break through the 
surrounding scenery like irregular and misshapen teeth or molars of 
the earth, and stand as individual and bizarre works of nature built 
of rock. For the most part they are without vegetation though well 
below the usual timber-line, their sheer and abrupt sides giving trees 
and plants no opportunity to grow; the forests which climb far up the 
altitudes in other parts of the Tyrolean Alps, wedding the mountains 
with the valleys below, are wanting here. 
The mountains themselves are more spectacular than our Wash- 
ington ranges but the supporting scenery of forest, stream, and 
mountain park is comparatively meager and rudimentary. The up- 
lying parks have their characteristic villages, and every narrow valley 
has a shoestring ranch with its Swiss cottage hanging up on some 
wave of the mountain-side or swinging low in the bottom. Think of 
