Day 3 – An Alpe di Siusi And Seceda Combo

Oct 3, 2022

Today’s Adventure

We took it easy on Monday so that we could recover from Sunday’s challenging hike around the Langkofel Gruppe. While we didn’t do much hiking, we did take in some spectacular scenery with visits to two of the top attractions in Val Gardena.

We started out by walking to the base station for the gondola for Mont Sëuc, just a short stroll from our apartment. It was a beautiful day so the gondola ride gave us a great view of Ortisei in the valley below. At the top of the Mont Sëuc gondola we turned right and headed west along the ridgeline. This trail brought us to the Malga Contrin, yet another of the charming hüttes that make travel in the Südtirol so special. We grabbed a choice table on the sun terrace with an expansive view across the Alpe di Siusi. After a pair of cappuccinos we decided to split one the house specialties, a pairing of Faschingskrapfen (a regional type of jelly donut) with a sweet dessert wine. A bit decadent, but this is supposed to be a vacation, right? We enjoyed this sweet treat and lounged a while in the sun before getting back on the trail and looping back to the gondola for our ride back down to Ortisei.

From the base station for the Mont Sëuc gondola it was just a short stroll across town to the gondola for Seceda, a dramatic ridgeline separating Val Gardena from Val di Funes, just to the north of Ortisei. A smaller 4-person gondola took us to the mid-station where we boarded a much larger cable car for the steep ride up to the top. We had seen countless YouTube videos and Instagram photos of Seceda before our trip so we thought that we were prepared for what awaited us, but nothing prepared us for the drama and scale of the view that unfolded as we stepped out of the upper station. The brilliant sunshine and clear skies really highlighted the jagged peaks all around us, some of them tipped with early season snow. We took in the sights and then headed off on a hiking trail towards Col Raiser. The trail took us to the Troier Hütte where we stopped for a late lunch on the sun terrace. We sat with a nice young couple from Seattle that we had met earlier up at one of the Seceda overlooks.

After our late and leisurely lunch we continued on the trail down the valley towards the Col Raiser lift house. We picked up the pace a bit to make sure that we had plenty of time before the lift shut down for the day. This lift took us down into Santa Cristina where we walked a few blocks and caught a bus that took us for the short but twisty ride back to Ortisei. Or at least we thought that it would take us back to Ortisei; because of some confusion with the bus signage and the fact that both the ‘uphill’ and ‘downhill’ buses shared the same stop in the town square we managed to get on the wrong bus initially – one of our few missteps during our entire month-long adventure. Once we realized our mistake we got off at the next stop and caught the correct bus downhill. Once back in Ortisei we made a quick stop at the Despar grocery store and then settled in for a quiet evening in the apartment.

Note that we had purchased a special pass for access to all participating gondolas, cable cars, etc. in the valley so this gave us a lot of flexibility in terms of where we went and how we got there without worrying about how much each individual ticket would cost. Cindy kept track of how much we used our lift pass and confirmed that it more than paid for itself during the course of the week. Our complimentary bus passes (provided as part of our apartment rental) gave us even more flexibility because we didn’t need to worry about getting back to our original starting point – we could always just catch a bus to complete the circuit. These ‘open jaw’ outings allowed us to take trails and trail combinations that otherwise wouldn’t have been available to us if we had a car and had to get back to the same starting point each day.

To return to the main page for Ortisei click here.

To return to the main page for the entire trip click here.