Awesome! …a word that has become trivialized from overuse.
Yet an enthusiast of national parks expects a certain amount of “awesome.” Each park ought to possess its own special features. When it isn’t on fire, Mount Etna boasts “height and wind.”
Height: Destination UP! Rifugio Sapienza’s cable way, the funivia, provides a pleasant ride for the first leg of the journey. Then makeshift byways, flattened around hills of black-brown ash and rock, lead even further up!
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Your teenage nephew, clad in flip flops, urges your group to walk the remainder of the way. Walk? Saner heads eye the Unimog vehicles – buses on monster-truck-sized wheels – and the route ahead. Teenage nephew, overruled!
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Ascending by Unimog, a wide-open landscape unfolds, concluding at a half-mile trail. The broad vista is outlined by the distant hazy sea. Not a single tree or shrub or even a blade of grass is in sight! Other Unimogs chug below, impossibly far off.
Wind: The trail features some volcano-warmed vents; fun to lean over! But the wind! Forceful and commanding, one feels diminished in it. A startling gust whisks your nine-year-old’s red cap off, up, and down the mountainside: gone, swallowed into the ashy slope.
Clinging together on a post, as if for neighborly support, is a cluster of ladybugs. Ladybugs, at 8,200 feet elevation?
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