Day 2 – A Visit To Alpe Nemes Hütte

Feb 6, 2023

Today’s Adventure

Day 2 in the Dolomites started out with some light housekeeping before we hit the road for our adventure du jour, a visit to the Alpe Nemes Hütte. First we stopped by the tourist bureau to ask them a few questions about train service and then we made a quick shopping trip to Despar, our local grocery store. Both errands were located in Innichen’s main pedestrian area, only a few blocks from our apartment.

When we got back to our apartment we grabbed our backpacks and caught the 10:45 bus heading up the Val di Sesto to a small town called Moos. Moos is a popular starting point for hiking and biking in the summer as well as cross country and downhill skiing in the winter. We arrived just after 11:00 and found the trailhead for our morning hike.

Trail 13 started out with a steep climb from the valley floor up through the woods to a high plateau called the Saumahd. From there it was a relatively gentle amble across a large tree-lined and snow-filled meadow known as the Nemes Alpe. In the summer time this area is used for grazing cows and horses but during the winter it’s covered in deep snow and is groomed with some wonderful trails for cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, and winter hiking. After crossing the Nemes Alpe we headed back into the trees for one final climb (thankfully rather short) to the Alpe Nemes Hütte, our lunchtime destination.

The Alpe Nemes Hütte is a classic Italian mountain rifugio with a menu of regional fare, often made with products raised on the property and served either in a traditional stube or outside on a sun terrace. We started with beer and red wine for a somewhat different ‘Two Beers with a View’ and then enjoyed a nice hot lunch, especially appreciated as the temperature was in the 20’s and we were sitting outside. Stuart ordered the Würstel mit Röster, German-style sausages with fried potatoes. Cindy ordered the Maccheroni Nemes, a pasta dish with tomato and cream sauce and ground beef. We’ve seen this same dish at other Hüttes called “Shepherd’s Macaroni”.

Many of these small family-run mountain restaurants use long picnic tables to maximize their outdoor seating, so it’s no unusual to have to share a table when you’re just a party of two. In this case we shared with a small tour group of retired folks from Germany, most of whom spoke English and all of whom seemed glad to meet someone from the US – Americans are definitely rarity here!

After finishing our lunch we headed out for another couple of miles of hiking towards the Kreuzberg Pass. We took what we thought was a short cut across a meadow based on how we had seen other people leaving the hütte. A number of others had used this path and it appeared to be fairly well-packed snow from foot and snowshoe traffic. All went well until we reached the bottom of the hill and started across a flat section where the snow was much deeper – every few steps our feet would break through the crust on top of the snow and we would sink up to and sometimes beyond our knees – this something that winter hikers refer to as ‘postholing’, as in digging a hole for fence posts. Alas, our snowshoes safe and warm back in the apartment because we didn’t think that we’d be needing them today, and if we’d stayed on the main trail we wouldn’t have! Slogging through that one stretch of meadow gave us some fairly intensive and unexpected exercise before we completed the alleged shortcut and made it back in the groomed trail.

One noteworthy landmark on our descent to the valley floor was a large concrete bunker set deep in the woods and overgrown with trees and moss. This was a remnant from the first World War and the fighting that raged hot and heavy in the northern part of Italy. This bunker guarded one side of the Kreuzberg Pass and was matched by a similar bunker that we saw during our hike on the other side of the valley back in September.

Our plan for the end of the hike (i.e. when we arrived at the Kreuzberg Pass) was to find a table on the sun terrace of the rather swank Hotel Kreuzberg was to share a slice of apfelstrudel and perhaps some schnapps for anti-freeze. Over the years we’ve learned that all good plans are subject to modification when you’re traveling – this was definitely true today. As we approached the Kreuzberg Pass we checked the Südtirolmobil (bus and train scheduling) app on Stuart’s phone and found that there would literally be a bus waiting at the bus stop if we hustled the next stretch of trail. We elected to grab that bus instead of killing time waiting for the next one because we knew that later in the day the buses become very crowded with skiers heading home after a long day on the slopes.

We hiked a total of around 6 miles today with an elevation gain of 1,883 feet, mostly in the early section leading up to the Saumahd.

For Innichen’s main page click here.

For Castelrotto’s main page click here.

For the entire trip’s main page click here.