Tre Cime was the plan.
It just didn’t want me.

Every kilometer between me and those peaks felt personal. Waze quit mid-sentence like a sulky friend, and I drove sixty kilometers too far before I noticed. Then came the tollbooth laps—Indy 500 style—back and forth through the Dolomites. Four… maybe five rounds. Each metallic ding another twelve-euro reminder that stubbornness has a surcharge. By the last pass, my dignity was idling on empty right along with the fuel gauge.

Then came the tunnel. On one of the laps through my growing tollbooth circuit, a car died ahead around a blind curve. I slammed the brakes; the smell of burnt rubber and fear filled the van, all the loose snacks catapulting forward like they wanted to take over the front seat. For half a heartbeat I thought I’d just killed a man—and possibly us. “Whoa! Big fella!” rattled around my head, hoping my giant van would stop in time. My son was out before I’d finished swallowing my heart, pushing the stranger’s car while traffic roared past. An Italian rescue truck appeared, lights strobing off the tunnel walls like a disco from hell. The driver shouted for me to get out of the way so he could push the car, but I had better odds of winning the lottery in Utah than merging into Italian traffic. My kid jumped into the stranger’s car to steer—he doesn’t speak a word of Italian, and I don’t speak remain calm. “Where are you taking my kid?” echoed in my skull until I saw them again, a click up the road at a gas station. Whew.
By this point, I was four hours late, had driven 200 kilometers past my destination, and seriously considered pulling a full Cartman—“Screw you guys, I’m going home.”

But I’d already spent 120 euros on parking, burned half a tank of fuel, and blew another small fortune in tolls. Going home empty-handed wasn’t an option. I was going to get a photograph if it killed me—which, at that point, felt like a coin toss.

By the time we finally reached the top, fog had erased the mountain like a rumor. Overnight, snow fell. (For that, I was thrilled—most Tre Cime shots are summer postcards.) The heater worked a little too well; it turned the van into a sauna. At 4:30 a.m., I bribed my knees to cooperate and waited for my kids to get moving—because of course they weren’t ready. That meant instead of a calm, contemplative hike, I was forced into a full-on ruck march through snow, mud, and air sharp enough to chew. All that was missing was a drill sergeant cadence calling cadence, “Yo left, yo left, yo left, right, left!” The mountain kept its poker face until first light hit—gold bleeding through clouds, stone catching fire, silence cracking open like applause. And me, last as usual (because after making me late, the boys always leave me behind), trying to run-walk with wrecked knees and a hip that had decided to take a siesta.

That frame wasn’t luck. It was endurance in a language only mountains understand.

I’ve been judged by curators from SFMoMA, Leica Gallery LA, and Aperture—but never so thoroughly as by a mountain that clearly didn’t want us there. When that light finally broke, it felt less like permission and more like a reluctant nod: Fine. You’ve earned it.