Watching the CBC coverage of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, something caught my eye. The graphic they kept using — the symbol of the games — was the unmistakable silhouette of the Ra Gusela, the dramatic rocky peak that dominates Passo Giau, high in the Dolomites of Veneto. It brought me straight back to an evening I had spent on that same pass, years earlier, waiting for the light.
My partner and I had arrived well before sunset, joining a small group of photographers who had claimed their spots along the ridge, all of us facing the same direction, all of us waiting for the same thing. The Ra Gusela has a way of transforming in the last hour of daylight. You watch it change minute by minute, the light shifting from gold to amber to deep red, the clouds moving in and out, the shadows stretching across the alpine meadows below.
As the hour passed and the light slowly faded, I could sense my partner’s patience wearing thin — it was getting dark, we were high up in the mountains, and we still had to drive all the way back to Venice. But I needed just a little more time.
The light, when it finally came, was everything we had hoped for — and then some. I captured two very different images that evening, minutes apart, each telling a different story of the same mountain.
Some places have a way of staying with you. And some mountains, it turns out, have a way of making themselves known to the whole world.
