For the past decade, every time I went up to the mountains here in my area, I got the chance to look at one particular mountain ridge standing there silently in the background. It spans roughly 30km, east to west. On one side, the Slovenian one, there’s the town of Kobarid. On the other, just more mountains. I’ve considered walking this ridge for years, every time making a different plan for how to tackle it. Some people do it in multiple days, sleeping either outside or in one of the various huts that are scattered all around. Other people split it in chunks, walking one section at a time. None of those options is either appealing or available to me at this moment in time. The only option I have is to park my car on one end, walk the whole thing in one go and have someone pick me up on the other side. As I said, it’s roughly 30km and some 2200 meters of ascent. It’s nothing crazy, but at the same time it’s not a walk I can go do completely at random. It does require at least some preparation, and part of that includes walking the two sections at the beginning and at the end, while the middle part is just one long crest so I’m not worried about that. To make my life easier, I could walk this west to east because that means doing only ~1800 meters of ascent, but what’s the fun in doing that? 2200 is way more appealing than 1800. So the plan is to end the walk on the Italian side, touching the summit of Mount Mali Varh for last and then descending to the little village of Micottis some 1000 or so meters below. The various maps do show a trail that goes up to that summit, but I learned not to blindly trust maps because more than once I reached places where trails were supposed to be there only to then find myself standing in front of either an impenetrable wall of vegetation or absolutely nothing. Speaking of maps, I recently learned about the existence of hiking.waymarkedtrails.org, which is a fantastic resource if you hike around Europe. The plan was to go up to Monte Testa Grande through the CAI trail 710, walk the final km or so of the ridge, and then come back down through that trail I spotted on the map. But during my preliminary search, I learned that the trail I want to walk on my way down for sure exists because they run a race on it! It’s the Ultra Vertickal Contesa and much respect to the people—and their knees—who go up this trail at that pace because it’s an enjoyable 37% of average slope and it looks something like this: And yes, as soon as I saw 37% I knew I had to go check how bad it looks and yup, it is bad. And nope, the trail doesn’t zig-zag its way up to the top. It’s basically a straight line. The people running the race do turn to the right near the top because the finish line is at the summit of Mount Contesa, which is the second to last peak of the ridge. The top of Mount Contesa at 1518 meters Being up here, walking the final bit of this ridge made me even more convinced of my plan. We’ll walk this whole thing in one go, and it’s gonna be awesome. The view is amazing; you can see the sea in the far distance on one side and the Julian Alps on the other. Descending down through the CAI 710 was also quite the experience. The trail is incredibly vertical in certain sections; according to Alltrails it’s anything between 50% to 60% (the uphill section peaks at 64%) and not very well maintained. I think I spent almost as much time coming down as it took me to go up, which is unusual. But the scenery was lovely. The trail ends—or begins, depending on the way you want to look at it—in the village of Monteaperta, so the only thing left to do was to walk my way back to the parking spot where I left my car. Very happy with this first preparatory walk. The ridge is nice, going up this stupidly steep trail was an experience, my cardio is shit, but we’re working on that, and I’m now even more convinced I’m gonna walk this whole crest one of these days. And I have a potentially quirky idea for how to share that walk, but more on that later. You love the outdoors and RSS. You're one of the special ones. Share something with me