> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.talusarchive.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Not Quite Wilderness - URL: https://www.talusarchive.com/andrewjordanharris-gmail-com/ - Published: 2024-09-14T22:20:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-23T22:21:37.000Z - Author: Andrew Harris // Dolomites, Italy // The mountains in the Dolomites don't really rise from the earth so much as interrupt it. You walk through these almost absurdly green pastures and then suddenly there is just stone. Huge pale walls of it. Towers and cliffs, gray and white and sometimes almost bleached-looking in the middle of the day. In the evening they turn pink. It doesn't really make sense that the two landscapes are together. And underneath all of it are cows. Lots of cows. Cow shit on the trail, bells around their necks, little wooden fences. There are farmhouses and roads and ski lifts and, often, a restaurant somewhere that seems like it has absolutely no business being there. I think this was one of the things that surprised me most about the Dolomites. They don't really feel like wilderness, at least not in the way I've always understood wilderness. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/28/0c/280c8cc6-44b4-4e34-8f10-90bd12d413d6/content/images/2026/09/2-IMG_4994.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/28/0c/280c8cc6-44b4-4e34-8f10-90bd12d413d6/content/images/2026/09/3-IMG_4978.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/28/0c/280c8cc6-44b4-4e34-8f10-90bd12d413d6/content/images/2026/09/4-IMG_4955.jpg) Most of the hiking I've done has taught me almost the opposite. You drive until the road gets worse, then until it ends, and then you start walking. Eventually you lose cell service. Then the buildings disappear. Sometimes eventually the trail disappears too. I've always loved that progression. There is something exciting about looking at a map and seeing a huge empty area and knowing that you're going into it. I don't think I'd really thought about how much of a value judgment I was putting on that emptiness. Somehow fewer people, fewer buildings, fewer roads meant the place was more real. More wild. Maybe even more valuable. The best thing we could do for a beautiful place was basically to get out of it. The Dolomites are very much not that. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/28/0c/280c8cc6-44b4-4e34-8f10-90bd12d413d6/content/images/2026/09/9-IMG_4371.jpg) Someone, at some point, looked at a meadow under a massive limestone cliff and thought it would be a good place to serve beer and pasta. And then someone built a road to it. And probably a ski lift. And somehow, against basically all of my instincts about what mountains are supposed to look like, I loved it. You'd spend the morning walking through fog or climbing over scree, and then you'd come around a corner and there was a rifugio. Red shutters, flowers in the windows, a bunch of packs dumped outside. People sitting around drinking beer. Someone making espresso inside. It was almost funny sometimes. You could spend several hours feeling very rugged and appropriately insignificant and then sit down at noon and order lunch from a menu. But the weird thing was that none of it seemed to make the mountains feel smaller. I think I've always thought of human presence in beautiful places as a kind of subtraction. Put in a road and you've lost something. Put up a building and you've lost something else. Keep going and eventually you've ruined the thing you came there for. And obviously this is often true. We've gotten very good at ruining beautiful places. But I couldn't look at a little rifugio sitting beneath one of those cliffs and honestly say I wished it weren't there. A lot of the time I thought it made the whole thing more beautiful. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/28/0c/280c8cc6-44b4-4e34-8f10-90bd12d413d6/content/images/2026/09/7-IMG_4717-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/28/0c/280c8cc6-44b4-4e34-8f10-90bd12d413d6/content/images/2026/09/5-IMG_4753.jpg) I've tried to figure out why. Part of it is probably just scale. A little building under one of those cliffs makes you realize how enormous the cliff actually is. At night especially, there would be this tiny warm window and then just a massive amount of dark rock behind it. But I think what got to me more was that people had clearly been living in these mountains for a long time, and nobody seemed particularly interested in pretending otherwise. People grazed animals here. They cut hay. They built trails because they actually needed to get over the mountains, not because AllTrails told them there was a nice view on the other side. They built barns and churches and houses. People were born in these valleys and died in them. The landscape wasn't something separate from human life that had somehow survived because everybody agreed not to touch it. Human life was already part of it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/28/0c/280c8cc6-44b4-4e34-8f10-90bd12d413d6/content/images/2026/09/1-IMG_5187.jpg) I kept thinking about Leave No Trace, which is something I believe in and will continue to believe in, so I don't want to turn this into some grand argument against protecting wilderness. I don't want a Starbucks at the bottom of every mountain. I don't want a gondola to every summit. There are places I love precisely because you can walk for days without seeing much evidence of another person. Still, I started wondering if there was something a little bleak about the idea that our best possible relationship with nature is to leave it alone. Because people had certainly left traces here. There were trails worn deep into the grass and old fence posts and stacks of firewood. Cowbells in the fog. Laundry drying behind the rifugio. Roads going places that roads really shouldn't be able to go. In the morning somebody would open the shutters and start making coffee. And it didn't feel like the mountains had lost. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/28/0c/280c8cc6-44b4-4e34-8f10-90bd12d413d6/content/images/2026/09/8-IMG_4526-1.jpg) I don't know. Maybe I'm romanticizing it. There are enormous ski resorts in the Dolomites. There are parking lots and cable cars and plenty of ugly development, and I'm sure there are complicated arguments about tourism and conservation and what has been lost there too. I was a tourist walking through for a few days. I don't actually know what it means to live there. But there was an intimacy between people and the landscape that I hadn't really experienced before. I remember the evenings most. The sun would get low and for a few minutes the limestone would turn this ridiculous pink-orange color, and then almost immediately everything would go gray and cold. Inside the rifugio there would be wet socks hanging somewhere and people talking about the weather tomorrow. Plates banging around in the kitchen. Someone ordering another beer. Someone taking a shower. Then you'd look out the window and there was just this enormous wall of rock. I suppose that should have made everything happening inside feel very small. It did, actually. But not unimportant. And I think that was the thing I carried with me from the Dolomites. I went there expecting the mountains themselves to be what I remembered, the cliffs and the passes and that strange pink evening light. And obviously I remember all of that. But I also remember the windows. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/28/0c/280c8cc6-44b4-4e34-8f10-90bd12d413d6/content/images/2026/09/10-IMG_4363-1.jpg)