In Cuneo: hiking in a chestnut forest

October 18, 2021

The day begins with Team Anderson rehearsing a new skit for their comedy show. The setup begins with them carrying their bicycles down 55 stairs to the street below. Once outside they’re preparing to bike off when Rachael realizes she’s forgotten her helmet and goes back upstairs to get it while Scott stands guard on the sidewalk watching over the bikes.

Five minutes later Scott is still waiting and starting to wonder, when the phone rings. It’s Rachael, sounding quite distressed. It takes a minute to decipher the situation to understand what’s happened, but when she came back downstairs she exited the building through the back door by mistake. The door locked behind her, and her keys don’t open it. She’s trapped inside of a courtyard, with a locked door behind her and a locked gate ahead. I could go in and open the door to let her escape, if I could get into the apartment. I don’t have a key though, and am locked out myself. We have two sets of keys but we only brought one with us this morning.

She can see through the gate to the street though. She’s just around the corner, so I wheel the two bikes around it to her gate so we can see each other and figure out what to do. I point out all of the spots that look like they might be panic buttons that will open the gate, but none of them work. We look at the tall gate, assessing whether it’s at all reasonable for her to scale it; but it isn’t.

We’re resigned to the embarrassing last resort of calling our host and asking her to rescue us, when I have an insight that comes on with such suddenness and clarity that I laugh out loud. I can see Rachael. She has a key. She could just hand me the key through the gate, and guard the bikes while I go back into the apartment and open the door to free her. Brilliant!

Let me out, let me out, she wails. I’d rescue my love, if only I had a key. Oh, wait.

So finally, we’re off. We’re taking a hike today, but it’s a bike and hike and bike scenario. The trailhead is nine and a half miles south of town, so we’re going to bike there, lock up the bikes, take our hike, and then bike back. There’s a train stop by the trailhead also so we could take the train, but it’s an easy enough bike ride so that it doesn’t seem worth the bother of constraining ourselves to the train schedule.

Cuneo is a reasonably bike friendly town, but this is exceptional. This is Viale degli Angeli (Avenue of the Angels), a scenic boulevard along the bluff above the Torrente Gesso. A two kilometer stretch of it is closed to motor vehicles on weekends and after 9 AM during the week, leaving it as a mile long car-free promenade.

RideWithGPS lied to us again. This is not paved. Nice views though, and I’m sure much better than the alternative here.

In spite of how the day has gone so far, we’re feeling lucky this morning and trust that our thin cable lock will keep our bikes safe until we return in four hours.

It’s a much more interesting hike than we had imagined. It’s an out and back, a scenario where Rachael can hike on ahead while I dawdle and then we’ll walk back to the bikes together. I’ve mapped out a route that turns back after just shy of five miles. We time box ourselves though to make sure we get back to the bikes before too late in the day, and agree that Rachael will turn back at 2:00.

It’s a charming hike at first, through a chestnut forest. Fallen chestnuts are everywhere, clogging the hiking path in spots; and chestnuts are still falling - we hear them regularly as we walk, and consider going back to get our helmets but decide against us because we feel lucky. Rachael goes on ahead while I take my time, enamored by the look and feel of the forest.

After awhile I find Rachael waiting on the trail for me. The path crosses right beside someone’s home, and she’s unsure if we really have right of passage. We stare at the Garmins, look for signs, and conclude that it must be OK. As we walk by the house a woman looks up from her garden. We call out buon giorno, and she smiles and responds in kind. So it really is OK.

Near the start of the hike we come to the major bridge crossing of the day. You won’t find it in your guidebooks though, I don’t think - you’re seeing about half of it here. Well maintained, with no gaps between the planks. Guard rails would be nice though.

We’re hiking in a chestnut forest! A new experience, one I’m very excited about at first. They look so inviting when you bike past, with their open understory - like beech forests.

Rachael gets ahead of me again, and then twenty minutes later I get a phone call from her. She’s been following the signs, and then noticed that she’s no longer following our Garmin track. There’s some discussion about this, and in the end she decides to return to our track and follow that. A few more phone calls take place to touch base over the next half hour. It’s slow going, but will be faster on the way down because we’ll know the way and can just follow our track back. I suggest that she go on until 2:15 before turning back, and she agrees.

She turns back before then though, when the trail starts seeming too precarious and uncertain. We stop by the trail for lunch, and then start walking back. By now the charm of walking through a chestnut forest has worn thin - we’re both tired of finding our footing on a surface of spiny nerf balls and picking spines out of our socks.

And the walk back is slower, not faster, because we keep coming to baffling spots on the trail where it takes us five minutes to figure out which of the five faint trails radiating from a junction is the one we want. We start out on one, staring at our Garmins to confirm our choice as we walk, and then realize we’re veering off and double back to look for another way. Stressful and frustrating, and we’re starting to get anxious about the time of the day as the woods start feeling worryingly dark.

For much of the way the trail is littered with fallen chestnuts. It gives us pause though - should we be wearing our helmets?

The trail is reasonably well marked, with orange swatches and arrows painted on the trunks of the chestnuts to guide you. If you’re paying attention, you should be fine.

There are spots where more signage would definitely help though, especially at junctions where five or six trails radiate from about the same point. Here’s a snippet from our uploaded track, from one of the spots where we spent about five minutes walking off in different directions, staring at our Garmin to see if we were following our track or not.

It’s steep terrain, and not particularly easy walking. Here was one particularly precarious spot - maybe thirty degrees, slick and gravelly.

Fortunately I found a serviceable walking stick early on in the hike.

Here’s a chestnut tree, one of thousands around us. They’re by far the dominant tree in the forest.

Chestnut forests are really colorful at this time of year, and a delightful place to hike - until they aren’t.

One problem is that in spots there are so many fallen chestnuts that they completely blanket the trail. They make a somewhat slippery walking surface, like stepping on spiny nerfballs.

Walking through a chestnut avalanche is interesting, especially on a steep or rocky slope.

Another problem is that the spines somehow work their way to the inside of your shoes and socks and jab you like little needles. It gets old and annoying after about the fifth or sixth time you stop to take your shoes off and try to find and remove them.

Mostly though, it really is beautiful. As long as you don’t get bonked on your bald, uncovered skull by a spiny husk dropping from a hundred feet up. Which didn’t happen today, thankfully. It could though - we constantly hear them falling to the ground, bouncing off branches on their way down and then softly rolling down the slope until they come to rest somewhere.

Chestnuts are the main attraction, but not the only thing worth noting. There’s the occasional fungus among us.

Until I got sick of tramping through chestnut hulls I thought I’d found my favorite type of forest, even better than a beech one. And then, suddenly we’re out of the chestnuts and into a real beech forest.

And there are spectacular views from the rare clearings. I’m sure they’re wonderful if you get higher up, but mostly we’re surrounded by forests. Here I think we’re looking south up the pass to the coast, toward Menton and Ventimiglia.

One interesting feature of this walk is the structures you occasionally pass along the way, rustic remnants of former villages.

On the way out we passed through one of the lower villages, still occupied, and found these two gents chatting across the trail, warmed by the fire in the open hearth to the side.

We make it out finally though, and right about on schedule. I hear the church bells in the village chiming four just as I’m rounding the last bend, a few minutes behind Rachael who’s already at the bikes and putting her cycling shoes on. It’s difficult walking, and a very good thing I’d found a walking stick to help me down. Otherwise I’d have gone down a slope or two on my butt and we might have still been in the woods when it got too dark to find our way.

By the time we make it back to the bikes, we’re both pretty well exhausted. Four hours and five miles doesn’t sound like much of a hike, but it was plenty. It’s a good thing that it’s nearly all downhill biking back to town.

Biking home, I have my second brilliant insight of the day while thinking about how little I want to carry my bike up 55 steps when we get back to the apartment. We can lock our bikes up in that courtyard Rachael trapped herself inside of this morning! It almost makes that whole fiasco worth it.

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Ride stats today: 19 miles, 700’; for the tour: 2,200 miles, 79,400‘

Hiking stats: 5.5 miles, 1,700’

Today's ride: 19 miles (31 km)
Total: 2,200 miles (3,541 km)

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Jen RahnGreat ending to the story .. a tale of anxiety leads to a soft landing spot for the Bike Fridays and a welcome unburdened trip back up the stairs!
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3 years ago

Scott AndersonTo Jen RahnUnfortunately there was a postscript I omitted. When we got back there was a note on the bikes asking us to please use the bike rack. There’s no room in the bike rack though, so we carted them upstairs again at the end of the day. We did save one round trip at least!
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3 years ago

Jen RahnWell dagnabit! I suppose one saved round trip is better than none!
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3 years ago