The grey wall of the Seekofel stands 2,810 metres straight out of the far shore of Lago di Braies, in the Dolomites of northern Italy. On a windless morning the whole of it is in the water as well as above it, upside down and almost flawless, until the first oar breaks it. The oar comes from the dark timber boathouse on the near bank, where painted wooden boats lie moored in a row. You take one out to the middle, where the water is coldest and the cliff goes up off the far shore with nothing in between. Snowmelt and springs feed it from below, and the water stays icy into August. The basin is not glacial: a rockfall off the Sasso del Signore blocked the Braies stream and ponded the water against the wall the lake now sits under.
The shore path runs level the whole way round, about three and a half kilometres of it. Half the loop you spend looking at the Seekofel across the water, the other half underneath it, where the wall comes down into the shallows beside you. At the southern end the Alta Via 1 breaks away for Belluno; the long traverse of the Dolomites starts on this shore, and the same junction climbs to the huts above. For one narrow week in early October the larch woods above turn deep gold and the colour doubles in the lake. A week early they are still green; a week late the branches are bare. That wall has a story of its own. In Ladin legend the Seekofel is the door to Fanes, a lost mountain kingdom, and once every hundred years its exiled princess rows silently across under a full moon. In deep winter the surface stops being water at all. It freezes under a dusting of snow, and people walk out to the middle — standing where you rowed in summer, and where the reflection of the wall lies at dawn.